24HOURCAMPFIRE

GUN SHOPS

24HOURCAMPFIRE — Mon, 04 May 2020 05:19:09 +0000

GUN SHOPS

by John Barsness

Whittaker Guns is a large enough enterprise to order “special runs” of new guns, like this Ruger American .22-250 with a 1-8 twist.

A FASCINATION with firearms appears to be innate in some people, though it may also be enhanced by experiences, especially early in life. This involves the old “nature versus nurture” debate, though of course among folks like you and me the question is essentially irrelevant.

What I do know is that my fascination began very early. My father wasn’t much of a hunter, mostly because he spent too much time subsistence hunting as a kid in rural Montana during the Great Depression. Yet he always liked guns, which is why my earliest memory of a gun shop occurred when I was five years old, just tall enough to see over the glass counter at the Powder Horn, then the primary gun shop in Bozeman, Montana, where I was born and grew up.

My father took me to the Horn one day, and I was standing next to him, my eyes barely above the countertop, when the guy helping us placed a “wood-grain” cardboard box on the glass. He lifted the top off the box, revealing a brand-new handgun, which a few years later I came to understand was a Colt Frontier Scout .22 rimfire, a scaled-down version of their famous centerfire single-action revolver. My father examined the Scout for a couple of minutes, then said he’d take it.

Eventually I also learned the reason behind the purchase (aside, of course, from simply wanting the little Colt) was a celebration: My father had sold an article to one of the pulp-paper Western history magazines popular in those days, about one of the U.S. Army forts established back when Montana was still a U.S. Territory, not a state. We later spent parts of several summer vacations visiting other forts from the same era, including some in Wyoming and Colorado, while he researched similar articles. But he wanted to commemorate his very first magazine sale, and the check covered the Colt’s price, which as I recall from that day in the Powder Horn was $50 — which correlates with the first listing of the Frontier Scout in GUN DIGEST’s 1958 annual, $49.95.

John still has the firearm purchased during his first visit to a gun store, his father’s Colt Frontier Scout.

It was also the first firearm I ever fired. On summer weekends our family frequently took country drives on the unpaved roads around Bozeman — now paved and surrounded by subdivisions. Eventually we’d happen upon a roadside gravel cut, used to add more pebbles to the road’s surface. These always contained a few empty beer and pop cans, complete with bullet holes, and those in the family big enough to hold the Colt would spend an hour or so plinking away.

My brother and I were fascinated by the empty cases, picking them up and keeping them in a big jar in the bedroom we shared. They were always .22 Longs, which my father believed were “just as good” as the more expensive .22 Long Rifles, but back then cost several cents less per 50-round box. After all, Longs were just about the same size as Long Rifles, and as a kid he’d killed plenty of cottontails and grouse with them.

Apparently all gun shops had wooden floors back then — as did many other stores, including Heeb’s Grocery in the middle of downtown Main Street, today a much larger and shinier supermarket on the east end of town. Wood-floor gun shops had a distinctive smell, a mix of the scent of the lumber itself, released as boots wore away the finish, plus tobacco smoke, and a hint of “gun oil” and Hoppe’s No. 9 from the gunsmithing department. Most real gun shops, such as the Powder Horn, offered various levels of gunsmithing, unlike the sporting goods departments in the nearby hardware stores.

The first really big gun store I remember was north of St. Paul, Minnesota. In the 1960s our family spent three scattered years in the Twin Cities while my parents acquired graduate degrees at the University of Minnesota. The four kids were in elementary school, and the family still sometimes went on country drives during weekends, though we did not do any country plinking.

Capital Sports & Western Wear carries firearms from the latest in-stuff to used guns, many made in the 19th century, like this 6mm Lee Navy.

Somewhere north of St. Paul we happened upon the big gun store, which like the Powder Horn had wooden floors and the same mix of scents. But the storefront was three times as wide as the Powder Horn’s, and the inside seemed to be as long as a city block. There were glass counters along all the walls, containing handguns, ammo and handloading supplies. Between the counters were several aisles, bordered by long guns standing upright in wooden racks. We looked at lots of guns, including a replica percussion Colt revolver that my father considered for quite a while, but eventually passed up.

During our last year in Minnesota I turned 13, and made my first gun buy at that store — though of course my father had to perform the actual purchase — a Marlin Model 81 .22 rimfire that I still have, along with the Frontier Scout. I don’t recall my father doing anything but plink with the Colt, but I have packed it quite a bit on local big game hunts, taking cottontail rabbits, snowshoe hares and ruffed, blue and spruce grouse. Handgunning “mountain grouse” is an old Montana tradition and totally legal, though you can’t use anything but shotguns or arrows on any other upland game in the state.

Since then I’ve visited many gun shops across the Lower 48 from Florida and Pennsylvania to Arizona and Washington, including Lolo Sporting Goods in Lewiston, Idaho, where Jack O’Connor used to shop and trade, which also has wood floors and offers gunsmithing services. There have also been several in Alaska, from big stores in Anchorage down to the tiny general store in the village of Sleetmute, which during my visit in 2009 claiming an official population of 86. The rack behind the counter held a row of new Ruger Hawkeye Alaskans in .375 Ruger, and on the floor stood several stacks of more .375 Ruger ammo than I’ve seen in one place since.

There have also been dozens of gun shops in foreign countries from Canada to Europe to southern Africa. Some even had wooden floors and the “correct” smell, including more than one German shop. Many gun shops in Germany also contain complete gunsmithing shops, because even some of their “factory” firearms are at least semi-custom. I also bought a couple of traditional woven rifle slings from a gun shop in Bergen, Norway, where the handloading section contained the only box of 400-grain .416 Swift A-Frames I’ve ever seen on a store shelf, even in Africa — probably for polar bear hunters.

This Mark X .375 H&H was among the first rifles I purchased at Capital Sports, and the only rifle taken on my first safari.

The gun shop I’ve frequented most over the past three decades is Capital Sports and Western Wear in Helena, Montana, the local “big” town where Eileen and I regularly shop for stuff not available in our little town. Capital, like the other gun shops in Helena, is an all-around sporting goods store, and of course also sells “western wear,” much of it hunting clothing. But the gun section not only offers the best array of used firearms of the gun stores in town (two of which only sell new guns) but a good gunsmithing shop. For many years, in fact, one of the gunsmiths was a guy named Arnold Erhardt, who built plenty of custom rifles from old-style flintlocks to modern benchrest rifles (including my 6mm PPC). Arnold “retired” several years ago — after helping Tyler Hansen, his eventual replacement, get started — but gunsmiths rarely really retire, and Arnold still builds a few rifles.

One of the conclusions I’ve come to since first accompanying my father to the Powder Horn is that really good gun stores share certain characteristics. These days very few have wooden floors, but neither do many other 21^st-century stores. Instead the most important characteristic of good gun shops is the people running the place, who feel about guns the same way we do. They may not have exactly our preferences, but they appreciate all gun preferences — and generally even the lower-level clerks are competent in helping us with ours.

This is the big advantage of Capital Sports over the other three stores in town. Capital does not have the best handloading or ammo selection, in fact they might be the sparsest of the four stores. The winner in that category is a chain store that appeared around a decade ago, on the opposite, “new” side of town. But the chain store only sells new rifles, the kind some Campfire loonies complain about — the rifles that appear on the covers of the latest printed gun magazines, often chambered for the latest in-cartridges. Of course Capital sells those as well, but is definitely the only gun shop in town where you have an equal chance of running across a new 6.5 Creedmoor or .338 Lapua, and military and hunting rifles made in the 1800s.

A modern .338 Lapua Magnum at the Capital Sports gun counter.

In fact the Capital gun shop has entire walls covered with older guns, many not for sale, from muzzleloaders to old bolt-action military rifles. One of these is a .30-40 Krag with an original, Army-issue canvas bandolier of 220-grain FMJ military loads. (I contributed the bandolier, one of two acquired in an ammo trade with another rifle loony.)

There are also shelves, just below the ceiling, full of ammunition that’s not for sale, including both military ammo and “old stock” factory ammo — often cartridges rarely, if ever, produced major factories anymore, including some from companies that ceased to exist decades ago. There are boxes of original .56-56 Spencer rounds, Savage-brand .22 High Powers, Winchester “grizzly” boxes full of cartridges such as the .33 WCF. No matter which way you turn, there’s no doubt you’re in a real gun shop. (Now, I do not want to give the impression that Capital Sports is the only good gun shop in Montana. There are others, but all farther from our home, such as Shedhorn Sports in Ennis and The Fort in Big Timber, distance being the reason we only visit them once or twice a year.)

Another gun shop we do not frequent due to distance, but is even larger than the Minnesota store where I purchased my Marlin .22, is Whittaker Guns (www.whittakerguns.com) on the southwestern outskirts of Owensboro, Kentucky. Eileen and I spent a couple days there in 2015, and unlike some modern gun shops it only sells guns and hunting gear. It had several dozen two-tiered aisles of upright long guns, and also several long handgun counters. Perhaps even more astonishing at the time, toward the tail end of the “Obama shortages,” it had a good supply of rimfire ammo, plus dozens of handloading powders I hadn’t see in stores OR on Internet sites for months or even years. It’s also a large enough business to order special-run guns, like the 1-8 twist Ruger American Rifle .22-250 I used to take the largest pronghorn buck in our Montana valley in the fall of 2018.

Eileen and I left with sizable dents in our shooting budgets. Among other things, I bought a Model 64 Winchester .30-30 with a Lyman 56 receiver sight, and Eileen a Ruger Single-Six Convertible, with .22 Long Rifle and .22 Magnum cylinders and a 9-1/2 inch barrel. And in every department, the clerks we talked to knew what they were talking about.

Just one of the many long-gun aisles at Whittaker Guns.

Since then Whittaker Guns has built an even bigger store. (You can compare the new store with the photos of the old store shown here at www.whittakerguns.com.) We have not returned, but need to, as it’s one of those places that, like Yellowstone National Park, requires more than one visit to really comprehend. Right now they claim an inventory of 35,000 guns, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were actually more.

You can also take a look at Capital Sports at www.shopcapitalsports.com. They resisted the Internet for a while, but like all of us — even those who remember the scent of wood-floored gun shops, and shop for both old and new guns — eventually accepted the 21^st century.

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Ask John Barsness Questions About “GUN SHOPS”

John’s new book MODERN HUNTING OPTICS and other great stuff can be ordered online at www.riflesandrecipes.com.

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THE PURSUIT OF PERFECTION

24HOURCAMPFIRE — Mon, 04 May 2020 05:14:16 +0000

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THE PURSUIT OF PERFECTION

by John Barsness

This free-range New Zealand red deer was not only killed with the boring old .30-06, but with a “target” bullet. Shot across a canyon while bedded down, the stag never moved from its bed.

ONE OF the many defining characteristics of the subspecies of the humans often called “rifle loonies” is the constant pursuit of perfection. This is understandable in, say, benchrest rifles, where the goal is to shoot several bullets through the same hole, but more iffy in hunting rifles. Which is, of course, why Campfire threads about deer rifles or (even more frequently) comparisons between two hunting cartridges go on and on and on …

This seems to be especially true the more the two cartridges resemble each other — and I’m not talking about the long-time gun magazine standby, the .270 Winchester versus the .30-06 Springfield. These days it’s more likely to involve the .270 Winchester and the .280 Remington/.280 Ackley Improved, or the .260 Remington and the 6.5 Creedmoor.

The “discussion” will also be crammed with more minutiae than .270 vs. .30-06, because rifle loonies obsess over minutia, as a result almost always ends up quoting lots of numbers. These include ballistic coefficients (especially important these days, when some hunters believe big game animals must be shot a long way off, or they don’t count). As an example, a few years ago I killed a whitetail buck with pretty fair-sized antlers on a riverbottom in eastern Montana. A photo of me and the buck showed up in a magazine, and some people commented on the Campfire, of course asking various rifle-loony questions about the rifle, bullet, range, etc. When I said the range was about 35 yards, one guy snidely suggested, “Only 35 yards! Not much of a hunter, are you?”

Cape buffalo can be killed with single-shot rifles, though it requires putting the single bullet in the right place. Luckily, buffalo have large “vital areas,” and are mostly shot at less than 100 yards.

The discussion of ballistic coefficients also necessarily quotes different sources, evoking arguments about which source is really, truly correct. Of course, that never gets totally settled because, unlike back in the old days when BC’s were set in stone by handloading manuals “updated” about once a decade, shooters who get into long-range hunting eventually realize that BC changes with varying conditions, mostly environmental, but also including velocity variations as the bullet travels at least 500 yards.

This in turn starts arguments about which bullet works best on big game. Some of these threads make a few of us wonder how ANY big game animal was successfully reduced to possession before high-BC bullets — which of course can start another discussion over the definition of high-BC.

There’s also a band of brothers who believe bonding a bullet’s jacket to the core automatically makes it work far better on big game. Years ago some guy phoned me to supposedly ask a question, but in reality to list all his perfect convictions. Shortly into the conversation he stated, “I won’t use a bullet unless it’s bonded.” I was tempted to ask him if it should be licensed and insured as well — but restrained myself, knowing it would keep him on the phone longer.

A similar trend started as monolithic bullets began working better, resulting in many hunters convinced they’re the ultimate big game bullet (except for those hunters who believe in ultra-high BCs). Of course, for hundreds of years almost ALL big game bullets were monolithics, because they were made entirely of lead alloy, with nary a jacket to be found.

Eileen Clarke killed this bison with a single 130-grain bullet from a .270 Winchester—not with a head shot, but typical behind-the-shoulder placement. It went about the same distance as a typical lung-shot deer before keeling over.

We also get into scope magnification, reticles and (these days) extremely repeatable adjustments. These discussions also go on and on, because apparently there’s a PERFECT magnification for any shot taken at a big game animal, whether at 10 or 1000 yards, and we simply must own a scope capable of being cranked to that specific, perfect magnification. Otherwise, once again, any animal we shoot may not be really, most sincerely dead — or at least not die to our standards, which are often affected by hunting videos, where just about every animal Drops Right There. (Though I have read different definitions of DRT, including any animal that falls within sight of the hunter — or as one smart-mouth suggested, DROT, Dead Right Over There.)

Then there are the rifles themselves. Many 21^st-century hunters firmly believe any rifles with old-fashioned wooden stocks are even more of a handicap than unbonded bullets. But even hunters who agree stocks should be made of some sort of anti-wood — whether miracle fibers, remolded water bottles or aluminum — can become quite vehement about their personal choice being PERFECT for some particular animal whacking. This despite the fact that their personal choice comes in a wide variety of weights, shapes, colors, and number of Picatinny rails.

Walnut-stocked rifles still take big game now and then, even caribou, which live in wet climates. Luckily, on this day the sun was shining.

At the opposite extreme are traditionalists who refuse to hunt with “plastic” stocks, and the thought of actually touching an aluminum stock makes them shudder, even on warm days. Many traditionalists also cannot imagine using any bolt-action without a long Mauser-type extractor, to “control” the cartridge during its long and difficult journey from magazine to chamber. Apparently this is because SOME sort of dangerous game may charge a hunter sitting in a stand overlooking a green field. After all, the Internet is filled with reports of mountain lions appearing where they “officially” don’t exist anymore, so we must constantly be prepared to stop any charge, anywhere, and the ONLY way to do so is with a controlled-feed action. (Unless, of course, we own a double rifle.)

One trouble with this continual pursuit of perfection is that big game animals come in a wide range of sizes, and among other places live in Arctic tundra, dry deserts, high mountains and tropical rainforest. You could probably hunt for a lifetime and never shoot one at EXACTLY the same range, and even white-tailed deer come in sizes from German shepherd (or if you prefer to argue some more, Belgian Malinois) to NFL lineman.

This is probably why so many rifle loonies keep changing their minds about hunting-rifle perfection: Every hunting moment is different, which is why we must remain ever-alert for possible perfection — and change our minds about that perfection, since the constant flow of “new and improved” stuff suggests we’re risking failure if we don’t take advantage of every possible variation.

A few years ago I did a radio interview with the host of a hunting show, who asked why rifle loonies change rifles almost as often as they change underwear. I replied, “Because they’re looking for the rifle that will change their lives.”

Believe it or not, big game can still be killed with iron sights, even beyond “woods” ranges. This red lechwe was taken at around 225 yards, yet many 21st-century hunters believe a 4x scope would be inadequate for such a shot.

If you don’t believe me, you’re probably one of the very few Campfire members who doesn’t regularly check out the classifieds. If you did, you’d notice ads for brand-new, high-grade rifle barrels, some of them already attached to high-grade custom actions — or at least a Remington 700 “blueprinted” by a semi-famous gunsmith. The ad will say, “Decided to go in a different direction.”

This means the seller started the process of “building” yet another custom rifle, but changed his mind in mid-project. I even recently saw one ad for a brand-new custom rifle that was, at that moment, in transit from the gunsmith, because the owner decided to “go in a different direction” after being told his perfect rifle was on the way.

The thing that’s puzzling about these ads, at least to me, is not that they exist. Like any rifle loony, I have occasionally changed my mind about unfinished custom rifles. The last was a reproduction Winchester High Wall single-shot from a top-notch company. I ordered it in .30-40 Krag — but before the custom shop had started putting together my rifle (which of course can take several months) I happened on exactly the rifle I’d ordered at a gun show — and the table happened to be rented by a good friend, who offered me a real deal. So I changed my custom-rifle order to .45-70, which showed up about a year after my initial order.

Of course, custom rifles can take MUCH longer to complete. One of mine took several years — and the gunsmith had promised it by “spring black bear season.” Sometime during this wait I asked him about the bear-season promise. He grinned and said, “I didn’t say WHICH bear season!” That was OK, because like any good little rifle loony I already had plenty of hunting rifles that would work on bears.

But one of my long-term custom rifles almost never showed up at all. This was a rifle arranged by a friend in the shooting biz, who said I’d helped him so much in various ways that he could arrange for a rifle to be built by a really good custom gunsmith, if I’d supply the basic parts.

Obviously, of course, he expected his gunsmith friend would get some publicity in return, and if the rifle worked like it should (I have encountered custom rifles that did not) I’d be happy to provide publicity. So I sent a spare bolt action off to the gunsmith, who would contact me after he checked out the action, so we could decide on a barrel and stock.

I didn’t hear anything for a few months, so called my friend to make sure the action had arrived. It had — but the gunsmith had some health problems that would prevent him from working for a while. (The health problems later proved fatal.) So my buddy got the action back, and arranged for two other gunsmiths to do the work, one a barrelmaker and the other a “traditional” stockmaker. Both owed my buddy favors, and agreed to the deal — but due to various factors were not particularly quick. In fact, eventually everybody except me and the barrel maker passed away — one of the hazards of ordering custom rifles as we grow older in the search for perfection.

Luckily, a few months earlier I’d grown weary of waiting, demanding the action, stock and barrel be shipped to me, five years after sending the action to the first guy. Not so oddly, some parts were missing from the action, but who knows which shop they were left in? It took me about two weeks to get the rifle up and running — with a synthetic stock I already had on hand. (One great virtue of synthetic stocks is they don’t take nearly as long to finish up.)

All of this is why I’ve become less enamored of the long-term pursuit of perfection, so often just buy an already existing rifle instead of having one “built.” This doesn’t mean I haven’t developed some notions of perfection, including the conviction that a .17 Hornet, shooting 20-grain plastic-tipped bullets, is the best prairie dog cartridge of all time. It works great out to at least 300 yards, about as far as most of us can hit more PDs than we miss, with so little recoil we can watch both hits and misses through a high-X scope. It’s also cheap to shoot, and barrels last a long time. (Of course, I’d probably change my mind if somebody developed a high-BC, plastic-tipped bullet for the .14 Hornet.)

Astonishingly, this mule deer was killed at just under 400 yards with a .30-06 shooting 180-grain factory ammo.

But over several decades of pursuing perfection I’ve also managed to hunt a lot of big game with a lot of rifles, cartridges, scopes and bullets, and also observe at least as many other rifles (both perfect and imperfect) in action in the hands of my hunting companions. During all that hunting I have seen several things that, according to some hunters, are simply not possible, including:

A number of trophy big game animals killed out to 500 yards with factory .30-06 ammo, mostly boring old 180-grain. (Since I’ve never seen this happen at over 500, apparently that IS impossible.)

Tough African game travel farther when “perfectly” hit by a .375 H&H than by a 7×57 or .30-06 — and moose and bison killed so quickly with one lung-shot from the dreaded .270 Winchester that there wasn’t enough time for a second shot.

This zebra went 200 yards when shot with a .375 H&H.

A grizzly bear killed with a push-feed rifle, which the hunter somehow manipulated for quick second and third shots, without a malfunction! (The extra shots turned out to be unnecessary, but it’s a good idea not to take chances on potentially dangerous game.)

More than one hunter jam a controlled-feed action, usually by short-stroking the bolt.

Cape buffalo killed with a single-shot rifle. (And the hunter survived!)

Many caribou bulls killed with walnut-stocked rifles, despite caribou living where the climate tends toward wet.

Big game killed quickly by “target” bullets, and wounded because “controlled expansion” bullets failed.

Custom rifles that would not shoot as accurately as an average factory rifle, because the gunsmith buggered the stock bedding, used a barrel with the wrong rifling twist, or over-tightened the scope rings.

This Alaskan grizzly is unaware that it’s not really dead, since it was shot with a push-feed rifle.

Of course, some scopes have fallen apart during hunts, both on my rifles and those of companions — but scopes have always been the weak link in modern hunting rifles. This is one reason I quit trying so many scopes several years ago. Instead I use older, well-proven scopes, or newer scopes that people I trust have tried. Even then there have been glitches, but nothing compared to the days when I had to try a dozen magical new scopes every year for various writing assignments.

Maybe I’m simply getting jaded — partly due to at least a third of my hunting rifles being well-proven synthetic-stocked models, suitable (if not perfect) for slaying anything from prairie dogs to Cape buffalo. However, this does NOT mean I’ve quit buying, selling and trading rifles. These days I’m more interested in the history of hunting rifles, so have purchased or swapped for rifles up to 150 yards old. Apparently this is due to realizing that while rifles still fascinate me as much as they did back in grade school, I’ve accepted the that none will change my life.

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Ask John Barsness Questions About “THE PURSUIT OF PERFECTION”

John’s new book MODERN HUNTING OPTICS and other great stuff can be ordered online at www.riflesandrecipes.com.

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THE WALNUT YOU NEVER KNEW

24HOURCAMPFIRE — Fri, 13 Mar 2020 03:45:48 +0000

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The Walnut You Never Knew

by Wayne van Zwoll

Once as common on rifles as black on Model Ts, walnut is going the way of hickory wheels. Here’s why.

Best-quality J. regia walnut, as on this Miller/Dakota rifle, is now very costly, and becoming scarcer.

“I just paid $2,250 for a blank! Not long ago our finished rifles sold for that!” The walnut Roger Biesen bought on the eve of his retirement a few years ago was no better, structurally, than wood he had seen his father, Alvin, work up for custom rifles in the 1960s. And by many standards no more comely! Al, who’d earned celebrity building custom rifles for Jack O’Connor, told me before his death in 2016 that he’d bought most of his walnut from Sacramento supplier Joe Oakley. After Joe died, he and Roger shifted their business to Ed Preslik, also in California, then to his son Jim.

In my youth, a semi-inletted stock blank of figured American walnut could be had for $25. I paid $7.50 for a plain blank from Herters, the Waseca, Minnesota mail-order firm whose telephone-thick wish-books found their way into the school desks of young lads like me. After a winter’s labors, the walnut I’d not whittled away still resembled, vaguely, a rifle-stock. I installed it on a Short Magazine Lee Enfield that had cost me $30. Another 10 bucks snared a pair of Williams sights. My first deer rifle had left me darned near broke. A $5 box of .303 cartridges would have to wait.

Since those days of 15-cent ice cream cones and 20-cent gasoline, prices for walnut have tracked dwindling supplies. Cheaper woods like birch and beech have replaced walnut on entry-level rifles. More appealing to some shooters are laminates. Heavier, they offer greater strength and stability. Imaginatively colored, laminate stocks have appeared on some top-tier rifles too. For the cosmetically conscious there’s another option: stocks with figured, naturally finished walnut slabs that from the side conceal a laminated core. These make good use of planks too thin for one-piece stocks.

This Ruger Scout Rifle wears a laminated stock: strong, stable, more affordable than “stick” walnut.

No doubt to early rifle-makers the supply of walnut seemed inexhaustible. During the 19^th century such illusion erased from North America many natural resources – from the old-growth pine forests of the upper Midwest where I teethed, to stands of virgin redwoods in California and Sitka spruce farther north. In a few decades hungry saws chewed through wood hundreds of years in the making. Walnut was ideal for fashioning gun-stocks. It was hard, but easier to work than oak, also lighter in weight and not as apt to shatter. Walnut had more pleasing color and figure than hickory. Quilted maple was prized, but it wasn’t common, and its pallor begged a stain.

As the frontier moved west, so did demand for walnut. After the Great War, Edward Cox Bishop saw a future in that market. In 1929, on the eve of the Depression, he moved to Warsaw, Missouri and with son John built a sawmill. His first stocks went to Remington for shotguns. In 1935 he began turning out semi-finished rifle-stocks. Four years later Bishop invited Reinhard Fajen of nearby Stover to join his company. Fajen custom-finished stocks for Bishop. Though WW II took the men in different directions, both returned to working with walnut.

In 1949 John Bishop, who’d acquired his father’s interest in the business, suggested to Reinhard Fajen that they merge. They did, for a couple of years; then Bishop sold out to Jack Pohl, a relative. Fajen started his own company and by the 1990s had 80 employees producing stocks for 200 models of shotguns and rifles. Warsaw had become the walnut capital of the country! Larry Potterfield bought the Reinhard Fajen Gunstock Company in 1992. Three years later, having started work on a sophisticated new wood factory in Lincoln, just north of Warsaw, Potterfield acquired Bishop too. Alas, demand failed to keep this stock-making venture alive; it closed down in 1998.

Any gun enthusiast growing up in the sunny pre-Vietnam years fondly recalls Bishop and Fajen!

Kimber blesses its Classic Select Grade rifles with French walnut. Here: a fine example on an 84M.

Time has clouded our view of the 13^th century, when Marco Polo allegedly brought walnuts from their native Persia to Italy. Nuts and seedlings found their way north to Continental Europe and England. Though Juglans regia, or “royal walnut” varies in grain structure and color by region, it carries that same scientific name world-wide. Common names indicate regions, not genetic disparity. English and French walnut are both J. regia. Many migrations later, across the Atlantic, it became “California English.” Most California English grown from nuts has a tawny background with black streaks, and less “marblecake” figure than England’s walnut. Classic French is commonly red or orange with black highlights. Circassian walnut (after a region in the northwest Caucasus, on the Black sea) typically has a dark, smoky character.

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American black walnut is still affordable, can be handsome, but is typically not as dense as J. regia.

American or black walnut, J. nigra, was favored by German gunmakers who crafted long, elegant flintlock, then caplock rifles in their Pennsylvania shops. These defined the famous, if curiously named “Kentucky” rifle. Predominantly warm brown in color, with black veins, American walnut has relatively open pores and, on balance, is not as hard as other species. The more ruddy Claro walnut, J. hindsii, was discovered around 1840 in California. Its surface too is more open and yielding than that of high-grade French or English walnut. Claro was crossed with English to produce ornamental Bastogne walnut. Nuts from these shade trees are infertile, but Bastogne grows fast. Stock-makers like its tight, recoil-resistant grain that also checkers cleanly. Fetching color and figure have increased demand for, and the price of, Bastogne. As with J. regia, the choicest Bastogne comes from trees at least 150 years old.

Walnut of all kinds can be plain or richly patterned, depending on the tree’s origin and age, also how it’s cut. Quarter-sawn walnut shows tight color bands, as the saw runs across growth rings. A plane-sawn blank has wider bands because the saw runs tangent to growth rings. Either cut can yield strong, handsome stocks for bolt-action rifles; but quarter-sawn walnut is a traditional favorite. Two-piece stocks for shotguns and nearly all rifles except bolt-actions are an easier assignment if you’re looking for color, figure and perfect layout, because you needn’t find a flawless blank 32 inches long.

A “London” oil finish suits this lovely Rigby. A fine oil finish stateside takes as long, looks as good!

I’ve yet to meet anyone with more walnut savvy than the late Don Allen, a commercial pilot who fashioned beautiful gun-stocks in his spare time. After building custom rifles that rivaled the best of his colleagues in that cottage industry, Don and his wife Norma established Dakota Arms in Sturgis, South Dakota. His Model 76 rifle was patterned after the pre-war Model 70 Winchester, but with better walnut, impeccably shaped, detailed and finished. Allen traveled the world to find superior walnut, later applying his talents in firearms design and stock-making to produce a Model 10 single-shot, a “baby” Sharps, and another dropping-block on the Miller action. He also fashioned an exquisite double shotgun that didn’t see commercial production.

Forty years ago, Don lamented that walnut was becoming alarmingly scarce. High-grade J. regia was already hard to find in England and France. “Fine wood comes from Turkey and Morocco,” he told me, “but even there, walnut is being felled at unsustainable rates. Some trees dropping in Turkey may be 400 years old! We’re inletting wood that predates the Declaration of Independence!” Pulp plantations grow harvestable trees in little more than a decade, but top-end walnut is the product of centuries.

Felling trees is pretty straight-forward; not so procedures thereafter. Walnut growers in France have steamed logs before cutting them into slabs (flitches). Steaming kills insects and turns white sap to amber. Before further sectioning, sawyers must also have in mind the shape and use of the final product.

Don Allen knew how to bring out walnut’s best. “Walnut must be dried before you attack it with tools,” he said. “Immediately after a blank is cut, its free water wants to escape. Think of a soaked sponge dripping. But if water leaves too fast, the wood can crack and check. Oddly enough, the surface can even crust, inhibiting further release of bound water.” A kiln throttles the drying process. He added, however, that you don’t need special facilities or equipment to bring wood gently to “safe” moisture content – just a cool, shaded place.

“After moisture content stabilizes at 20 percent or so,” Don continued, “the blank can be air- or kiln-dried without damage. Just avoid extremes of temperature and humidity, and periodically weigh the blank. When weight stabilizes, it is ready to work. Some stock-makers turn the blank to rough profile at this point, then let it dry six more months.”

Before shaping a blank, the stock must be laid out, its final shape sketched to make the most of the wood’s grain, color and figure. Viewed from the side, the grain of a quarter-sawn blank should run parallel with the grip, for maximum strength there. From above, grain in the forend should parallel the bore. While dense wood with tiny pores is preferable in all stocks, straight-grained wood perfectly laid out can be stronger and more stable than figured walnut of higher density but squirrely grain. Figure in the butt is benign; not so crotches and knots in grip and forend.

Glass bedding strengthens wood and reduces movement caused by environmental changes, but it can’t eliminate warpage. I’m sweet on glass or epoxy in the recoil lug mortise, to prevent splits in tang and magazine web and afford the lug firm, unchanging contact with the stock. A patch of glass under the tang makes sense too. Alloy pillars also ensure constant guard screw tension. While glass can be used to hide shoddy inletting, it can also complement superior work, to protect slender stocks from brutal recoil.

Not just a stand-in for hand inletting, glass bedding the recoil lug makes sense for hard-kicking rifles.

Checkering dresses up walnut and helps you grip the rifle. Once, all checkering was hand-cut. As hand work of all kinds became anathema to company accounts in the mid-20^th century, machine-pressed panels appeared on production-line firearms. These impressions, with “diamonds” in reverse, looked as if hammered in by a meat tenderizer. Machine-cut checkering followed, and has improved.

Still requisite on fine custom rifles, hand checkering on hard, tight-grained walnut can be as fine as 32 lines per inch (lpi). Such diamonds appear mostly inside skeleton grip caps and butt-plates. Grip and forend panels wear more utilitarian diamonds. I prefer 24 lpi here, but 20- to 22-lpi checkering is more common, especially on “factory” rifles.

Most checkering panels fore and aft are variations of fleur-de-lis and point patterns. A basic fleur-de-lis is easiest because it’s a fill-in job. A point pattern incorporates the border. Minor mis-direction of the cutter inside a filled panel isn’t necessarily fatal; the flaw may be visible only on close inspection. An off-kilter line in a point pattern, however, dooms the panel! Fine ribbons and bars inside any patterns are for experts. Stock-maker Gary Goudy and others of his exceptional talent cut ribbons as slim as fly-line, uniform and clean-edged.

At Ruger, an inspector eyes a machine-checkered stock for a Hawkeye rifle. Plain American walnut.

Long ago, I refinished gun-stocks for a shop whose brisk sales and trades sent rivers of second-hand rifles and shotguns through inventory. “Can you make bad dings go away, freshen the wood a bit, enhance the figure and make your finish look original?” asked the proprietor. “Absolutely,” I assured him.

Then the first Remington 700s and Weatherby Mark Vs landed on my bench. Their thick, shiny polyurethane finishes, essentially plastic shells applied as liquid, magnified scars. Patching with similar goop failed. I couldn’t feather old finish to produce a seamless union with new. My job then was to hand-sand all that water-proof, abrasion-resistant glitter down to the wood without scratching it. Any dishing of flat places or rounding of edges would nix an original look. Sanding behind the grip cap and up to where metal met walnut was especially tricky.

But enough whining. Hardship is relative. I was blessed too with stocks finished in varnish and oil, and a few with finishes worn and weathered off.

Oil finishes lend themselves to renewal and minor repair without full refinishing. “Oil” doesn’t refer to petroleum oil; it’s shorthand for plant-based products like tung oil (from the pressed seeds of tung tree nuts) and linseed oil. These oils dry or polymerize in air, though more slowly than you’d like. Heat-treating speeds curing; you’ll want boiled – not raw – linseed oil. Commercial oil finishes, like George Bros. (GB) Lin-Speed and Birchwood Casey’s Tru-Oil dry even faster than boiled linseed oil. Tung oil cures to a gloss that’s a tad harder and shinier. All can be feathered into lightly sanded surface repairs.

Custom stock-makers have famously guarded their pet finishes. Curt Crum has been forthcoming. For decades he has expertly finished the stunning walnut on David Miller rifles with Daly’s Teak Oil. (A water-thin sealer fills pores first.) A range of products and processes may be used to yield the warm sheen of a traditional oil or “London oil” finish.

Production-line rifles don’t merit the costs in time and labor of hand-applied oil finishes. Factory finishes have evolved. The first Winchester Model 70 stocks, in the late 1930s, wore a clear lacquer finish over alcohol-based stain and filler. The lacquers contained carnauba wax. Small flaws were repaired with stick shellac. As WW II drained supplies of carnauba wax, harder lacquers arrived. Unlike shellac (whose Sanskrit root referencing beetle or tree secretions pops up in both words), lacquers cure without imparting an amber hue, and are water-repellant.

Excepting polyurethanes, a chemical paint stripper will remove gun-stock finish to prep the wood for refinishing. Let the stripper curdle on the surface, then scrape or, with coarse steel wool, scrub the old finish off. Use a toothbrush with stripper to clean checkering. Then mask the checkering with tape before sanding, and leave that tape in place until after refinishing is completed.

Whether finishing, re-finishing or spot-repairing the finish on walnut gun-stocks, choose sanding grit just coarse enough to get desired results. Unless you’re re-shaping, stay with 220 or finer. Remember; you must remove sanding marks with finer paper! A sanding block (I use a hard-rubber eraser and, for curved surfaces, a section of dowel) helps you hew to the original profile. It keeps flat surfaces flat, edges sharp. Without the block, finger pressure can produce surface ripples. Un-backed sandpaper easily rides over edges, rounding them. Those edges should instead remain sharp until the very end, when you’ll blunt them slightly with a touch of very fine paper. I also leave until last all wood near where the stock meets steel. Once compromised by sandpaper, the original fit of walnut to metal is ruined!

Sand only in a well-lighted place, in sunlight when you can. Examine the stock often and closely. You want to find scratches, so they don’t first appear after you apply new finish. For final sanding, use wet-or-dry emery paper, 400-grit. Wet, it raises the grain and whiskers from the wood, as does steaming out dents with an iron over a wet rag. Dry strokes remove those hairs.

At this point, you may wish to apply stain, wiping it on evenly with a rag. Unless I must match an existing look, however, I don’t stain walnut, or even light-colored woods. On stocks to be finished with boiled linseed oil or a commercial substitute, follow the final sanding or steel wool polish with a thin coat of oil. It will show scratches missed earlier. Wipe off the oil, tend to the scratches, then rub the stock with a dry cloth and set it aside. A day later, if another inspection shows no sanding marks, and there’s no trace of oil, consider applying filler.

Unless the wood is tight-grained, I fill pores with spar varnish. It’s weather-resistant and thicker than most oils. It dries fast. More than one coat may be needed. Cutting surface buildup between coats with fine sandpaper or steel wool absolves you of work later. Once the varnish has filled pores to a shine, polish the stock with 600-grit paper. If you feel any stickiness, let it dry until there’s none.

Before applying finish, ensure the stock is dust-free and you’ve a coat-hanger dangling to receive it. Rub in boiled linseed oil until the wood gets hot under the friction of your hand. Thinning the oil with turpentine enhances its penetration in the wood, and can yield a slightly darker hue. Let the stock hang for a day. Drying time for Lin-Speed and Tru-Oil is considerably shorter. When the stock is dry, rub in more finish, polish this off with a soft cloth and let it dry again. You may wish to cut one of these early coats to wood with 600-grit paper. A slurry of rottenstone in boiled linseed oil can polish out small imperfections. Patiently add finish in very thin coats, ensuring that each is dry before adding the next.

The secret of a fine finish is multiple, very thin coats of oil. One ace stocker gave a fetching piece of walnut 25 coats! With boiled linseed oil, drying time can stretch from days to weeks and months! Push that schedule at your peril! As a last step, remove tape from checkering and brush oil lightly into it with a toothbrush. Let dry. Repeat. You’re done.

An oil finish is easy to repair. Light scratches can be rubbed away with an oiled cloth. Whichever oil you use, occasional light polish with boiled linseed oil, then a soft rag, can keep a stock looking fresh.

After a refinish, then periodically, toothbrushing in boiled linseed oil cleans and freshens checkering.

Beginning of the end?

Walnut had long seemed the ideal gun-stock material when after 143 years of building rifles with wood stocks, Remington announced its Nylon 66 autoloader. Between 1959 and 1990 more than a million of these 4-pound .22s with Zytel nylon stocks endured abuse from lads running trap-lines and exhibition shooters spewing bullets by the carton. With Nylon 66s, Remington salesman Tom Frye challenged Ad Topperwein’s eye-popping record on tossed 2 ¼-inch wooden blocks. During a marathon session in San Antonio in 1907, Ad had wearied several Winchester 1903s firing at 72,500 blocks. He’d drilled 71,491, including a run of 14,500 straight! Unintimidated, Frye passed the 43,725 mark with just two misses. He stopped at 100,010, having splintered all but six. The feat was less a tribute to the new rifle than to Frye’s stellar marksmanship. But Remington capitalized on it, following in 1963 with the Zytel-stocked XP-100 single-shot pistol in .221 Fireball. Walnut had a competitor.

Synthetic stocks, from polymer to fiberglass to carbon fiber, have since multiplied. They’re stable in wet weather (though not immune from expansion and contraction with temperature change). The best are quite handsome. But they lack the history, soul and individuality of walnut. Always will.

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Ask Wayne van Zwoll Questions About “THE WALNUT YOU NEVER KNEW”

Wayne van Zwoll has published 16 books and roughly 3,000 magazine articles on firearms and hunting. Five of his most popular books are: Shooter’s Bible Guide to Rifle Ballistics ($20), Shooter’s Bible Guide to Handloading ($20), Mastering Mule Deer ($25), Mastering the Art of Long-Range Shooting ($30) and Gun Digest Shooter’s Guide to Rifles ($20). Limited numbers are available, autographed, from Wayne at 2610 Highland Drive, Bridgeport WA 98813. Please add $4 shipping.

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THE REALITIES OF BALLISTIC COEFFICIENT

24HOURCAMPFIRE — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 07:32:42 +0000

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THE REALITIES OF BALLISTIC COEFFICIENT

by John Barsness

A flat trajectory often matters more on varmints, because they’re smaller targets.

BEFORE COMPACT, affordable laser rangefinders became available to in the late 1990’s, the primary emphasis for open-country hunting cartridges was high muzzle velocity, resulting in a flatter trajectory out to “normal” hunting ranges. The definition of normal depended on the hunter: Some considered 300 yards a long shot, while others extended their maximum to 500 — though exactly how they guesstimated 500 yards was a valid question. Still, somewhere between 300 and 500 was the practical limit, due not just to range-judging but the steep drop in trajectory of any bullet much beyond 400 yards, where a misjudgment of 50 yards could cause a complete miss of most varmints, and wound big game.

Lasers redefined not just normal shooting distances, but changed ballistic priorities. The former emphasis on high muzzle velocity, whether with 50-grain bullets from a .22-250 for shooting prairie dogs or 130-grain bullets from a .270 for hunting deer, changed to an emphasis on ballistic coefficient. Oh, there’d been some awareness of BC before then, but out to 400 yards muzzle velocity flattened trajectory more than BC, and a flat trajectory made hitting easier by minimizing the effect of errors in range-guessing.

But after hunters could actually KNOW the range, rather than guess, another “guessing” factor became more important, wind-drift. Today tiny hand-held anemometers allow us to measure wind direction and velocity pretty precisely, and computerized ballistic programs tell us what effect both will have on our bullet. But wind has a funny habit of changing direction and velocity over several hundred yards, and not just horizontally but vertically.

While a very high muzzle velocity minimizes wind-drift at “normal” ranges, as a bullet loses that initial velocity, wind-drift increases much faster at the longer ranges made possible by laser rangefinders. Long-range target shooters had known this basic fact for decades, because they normally shoot at known distances anyway. It took a while for the knowledge to sink in among hunters, but because of all the long-range hype eventually many hunters who don’t really shoot all that far started thinking they needed to shoot heavier, sleeker bullets with high BC’s, rather than lighter bullets with average BC’s.

A flat trajectory often matters more on varmints, because they’re smaller targets.

These days 500 yards is still a long shot even for hunters who dial the elevation turrets of their scopes, and for a good reason: Not many hunters actually get to practice much at ranges beyond 500, and those who do find making consistent first-round hits in any but the gentlest breezes difficult. (Those long-range hunters who brag about making shots at 800+ yards sometimes use an old artillery technique called a “ranging shot,” aiming at something a few yards from an animal to see where the bullet lands, then adjusting for the “real” shot. But this works only if animals are so far away the sound of the shot doesn’t spook them.)

As a result, around 500 yards is the practical limit for most hunters — and out to 500 yards, or even 600, ballistic coefficient doesn’t always significantly outrank muzzle velocity in terms of wind-drift. As an example, let’s use a ballistic program to plot the trajectory and wind-drift of two bullets from the 6.5 Creedmoor, one of the more popular cartridges for such use, due to the high BC of 6.5mm bullets.

The trajectory of each bullet starts with sighting-in two inches high at 100 yards, because even many hunters who practice long-range shooting leave their scopes at a similar setting, just in case they need to take a quick “normal” shot out to 250-300 yards. The trajectories are plotted with the scope centered 1.6 inches above the bore, for average fall environmental conditions during most of my hunting in Montana, but the differences between the trajectories would be similar with other scope heights and conditions. Muzzle velocities are an average obtained from published data, and similar to what I’ve gotten from handloads in Creedmoors with 22-24 inch barrels, and the trajectory and wind drift numbers are rounded off to the nearest half-inch:

Berger Hunting VLD 130 gr., 2900 ft/sec	100 yds.	200 yds.	300 yds.	400 yds.	500 yds.	600 yds.	700 yds.
Trajectory	+2.0 in.	+1.0 in.	-5.0 in.	-16.5 in.	-34.5 in.	-59.5 in.	-92.5 in.
Wind Drift	∼	2.0 in.	4.0 in.	8.0 in.	13.0 in.	19.0 in.	27.5 in.
Retained Velocity	∼	∼	∼	∼	∼	∼	1,985 ft/sec

Berger Hunting VLD 140 gr., 2750 ft/sec	100 yds.	200 yds.	300 yds.	400 yds.	500 yds.	600 yds.	700 yds.
Trajectory	+2.0 in.	+0.5 in.	-6.5 in.	-19.5 in.	-40.0 in.	-67.5 in.	-102.5 in.
Wind Drift	∼	2.0 in.	4.5 in.	8.0 in.	13.0 in.	19.0 in.	26.5 in.
Retained Velocity	∼	∼	∼	∼	∼	∼	1,921 ft/sec

Note that out to 600 yards, wind drift is essentially identical. The higher-BC 140-grain bullet only starts to drift less at 700 — by an inch, meaningless on anything larger than a prairie dog.

The trajectory of the 130 is obviously considerably flatter even at 700 yards. This wouldn’t matter to somebody dialing the range with the elevation turret, but would to a hunter who prefers to use a multi-point reticle. Many do, because reticles work fine for big game out to 500 yards, and multi-point reticles are available in scopes about half the weight and size of the heavy-duty scopes preferred by serious dialers.

The same sort of “balance point” between high BC and high velocity exists in varmint cartridges, but the advantage often swings more to the velocity side due to a simple reason: A flat trajectory often matters more on varmints, because they’re smaller targets.

While laser rangefinders continue to improve, the typical model used by a prairie dog shooter only provides a rather approximate range. The laser isn’t a tiny pinpoint of the same diameter regardless of range, but more like a flashlight’s beam, becoming wider with range. Consequently the reading we get isn’t always from the dog, or even its mount, but often from a sagebrush or tiny cutbank 10-20 yards away. This wouldn’t matter when shooting at a deer, but can when shooting at a prairie dog only an inch or two wide.

As an example, a 40-grain Hornady V-Max started at 3750 ft/sec from a .204 Ruger drops about four inches between 200 and 300 yards, an average of less than half an inch every 10 yards. A 75-grain Hornady V-Max started at 2850 ft/sec from a .223 Remington drops almost an inch per 10 yards from 200-300. As a result, a ranging error of 20 yards isn’t nearly as critical with the .204, and the two bullets both drift seven inches at 300 yards in a full-value 10 mph wind. The advantage goes to the high-velocity .204.

Out at 400 to 500 yards the difference in drop is somewhat less, but the .204’s bullets still drop at about 2/3 the rate of the .223’s. But the .223’s bullets do start to drift a little less, about two inches at 400 yards and three inches at 500. However, the .204 has another slight advantage, since its bullet arrives about 15% faster, slightly over 1/10th of a second. This may not sound like much, but prairie dogs can move just enough in a tenth of second to cause a miss. Let’s call it a draw between the much faster .204 bullet and much higher-BC .223 bullet at 400-500 yards. All of which is why I prefer the .204 for prairie dog shooting out to 500 yards, and only use much higher-BC bullets, whether from a .223 Remington or larger cartridge, beyond 500.

Since the percentage of hits goes way down beyond 500, even in calm conditions, I don’t waste much ammo shooting at dogs over 500 yards away anymore. Sometimes, however, the temptation is too much to resist, the reason a rifle chambered for a larger cartridge still gets taken along.

Our fathers and grandfathers tended to choose higher muzzle velocity rather than BC, because velocity made hitting easier at “normal,” guessed-at ranges-while not realizing how much extra wind drift was affecting our bullets beyond even 200 yards. But we shouldn’t make a similar mistake by assuming higher ballistic coefficient always makes hitting easier at longer ranges. Thanks to ballistic programs, the relationship between velocity and BC can be easily compared for different bullets in any cartridge — and should be, since the major point of laser rangefinders is to help make sure hits at any range.

###________________________

Ask John Barsness Questions About “THE REALITIES OF BALLISTIC COEFFICIENT”

John’s new book Modern Hunting Optics and other great stuff can be ordered online at www.riflesandrecipes.com.

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RIFLE SCOPE RETICLES

24HOURCAMPFIRE — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 23:57:27 +0000

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RIFLE SCOPE RETICLES

by John Barsness

Many dialing scopes have an exposed elevation turret, but some designed specifically for hunting, like this Nightforce SHV, have a capped turret.

THIS WILL date me some, but when I started hunting the basic choices in scope reticles were plain crosshairs, post and dot. Dot reticles were hung on the intersection of thin crosshairs, and usually post reticles had a horizontal crosshair, but not always. A few other specialized reticles existed, but I never saw any until much later, after starting to write about hunting optics and collecting a few old scopes. As far as I know, no reticles back then were etched on glass, as so many are today. Instead they were actual crosshairs, posts and dots, usually attached to tiny screws on a reticle “cell,” a metal ring mounted inside the scope.

Some purists point out that “crosshairs” aren’t actually hairs, but fine wire, so call them crosswires, a term that’s never caught on with the general public, including most shooters. But very early rifle scopes often did use actual hair for reticles, and in fact back when I was young and poor one of the crosswires in a cheap 4x scope broke. Back then most scopes could still be taken apart by hand, so I managed to get the reticle cell out of the tube and replaced both crosswires with my own hair. This worked pretty well, partly because back then my hair was all black, and the reticle never turned silver or brass when the sun angled over my shoulder when looking through the scope, as crosswires often do.

None of those three reticles worked great for all hunting. If the crosshairs were thin, to aid precise aiming, they tended to disappear in sunless woods, partly because most scopes weren’t very bright optically, so there wasn’t much contrast between woods and reticle. With heavier crosshairs some aiming precision was lost. The same principle also applied to dot reticles or various sizes, the reason most hunters (including gun writers) advised using post reticles for woods hunting big game, and crosshairs for smaller game, whether edible or varmint.

Trijicon’s tritium/fiber-optic reticles work very well, and don’t require electricity. I used a 1.25-4x AccuPoint on this Alaskan grizzly.

Leupold introduced their Duplex reticle in 1962, a little before I started using scopes, but I didn’t know anybody who used a Leupold, since they were comparatively pricey compared to the Weavers most hunters used, and a lot more expensive than the “off brand” Japanese scopes then flooding the market. The Duplex consisted of four heavier posts surrounding finer crosshairs in the middle, which wasn’t a new idea: European scope manufacturers had provided similar reticles for decades, because many European countries allowed shooting longer before sunrise and after sunset than the semi-standard America half-hour, or even all night.

But apparently most American scope manufacturers either didn’t think such reticles were necessary for daylight hunting, or couldn’t figure out how to make them. Leupold did it by flattening the outer portion of the crosswires. This weakened the wires slightly, and in fact the few Duplex reticles that have broken in my Leupolds snapped right at the juncture of the flat and round sections. But in general they hold up pretty well.

Soon other companies offered the same basic reticle, often with names including “plex,” and by the 1970’s they were more common than plain crosshairs, and far more popular than posts or dots. Some hunters discovered a plex reticle could be used to estimate range by comparing the distance between the tip of the bottom post to the intersection of the crosshairs to the size an animal–and the same tip could be used as a secondary aiming point at longer ranges.

Neither of these principles were totally new. Some previous reticles had included extra horizontal crosshairs, or dots on the vertical crosshair, for range-gauging and aiming at longer distances, and in fact Elmer Keith used a scope equipped with such a reticle hunting antelope, as I recall on a .280 Dubiel, a wildcat based on the .300 H&H. But plex reticles provided a simpler version.

For most hunting a basic plex-type reticle works very well, like the one in the scope on Eileen’s NULA .257 Roberts that took this late-evening whitetail.

I used a 3-9x Weaver with their plex reticle when guiding pronghorn hunters in the 1980’s, and it proved to be much more accurate at longer ranges than “holding a little high,” partly because it bypassed the common advice of estimating how many football fields stretched between a hunter and a distant animal. I killed several bucks at 450-500 yards, both during my own hunting and when finishing off wounded bucks shot by others, and eventually used the method on other big game.

But antelope were the big teacher, partly because they’re pretty uniform in size, with a mature Montana doe or buck measuring 15-16 inches from the bottom of the chest to the top of the shoulders. This provided a range estimation that can theoretically vary about 7%, but in practice is usually less, sufficient to place shots into the volleyball-sized vitals with a flat-shooting rifle out to 500 yards. But beyond 500 yards just about any bullet started dropping too steeply for the method to always work.

When laser rangefinders started appearing in the late 1990’s, scopes with several aiming points on their reticles started appearing as well, and eventually we could choose among several dozen versions. I found just about any of them were an improvement over a simple plex, especially on long-range varmints, where aiming had to be more precise than on a pronghorn. By then plastic-tipped bullets had increased the potential range of prairie dog rifles, by both increasing ballistic coefficient and expanding violently much further out than softpoints or, especially, hollowpoints.

Before lasers and multi-point reticles, most PD shooters used a mild cartridge for shooting out to 250-300 yards, usually a .222 or .223 Remington, and bigger cartridges like the .22-250, .220 Swift or .243 Winchester for longer ranges. But post-laser, many started using .223’s for almost all their shooting, partly because with a heavy-barreled .223 they could spot their long-range misses through the scope, instead of relying on somebody else to say, “A little high and right.” Which meant just about zip, especially with some so-called spotters.

I started using the .223 as my primary PD cartridge around 2000, but even with all the advancements many shooters clung to larger cartridges for longer ranges, partly because many also clung to plex reticles or even plain crosshairs. I startled one such shooter on a Wyoming prairie dog hunt. He’d been whacking away with his .22-250 at a group of PD’s around 550 yards away, and had already missed half a dozen times. My .223 had a Swarovski scope with their early “Christmas tree” reticle, featuring increasingly long horizontal lines on the vertical crosshair, which helped considerably when compensating not only for range but the near-constant prairie wind. My first shot just missed, but my second didn’t, and he was astonished to find “his” dog had been shot with a .223 instead of some larger cartridge.

Of course, it didn’t take long post-laser for some hunters to start twisting the elevation dial for more precise aiming at longer ranges. This also wasn’t a new idea, even in hunting scopes. For quite a while I owned a 2-1/2x Noske scope, made in the 1940’s, with an elevation dial marked out to 800 yards for the 150-grain .270 Winchester load. It actually worked pretty well when I tried it on rocks, but the reticle was a thick post, not the best for long-range aiming.

In the late 1970’s Bushnell introduced what I recall was called the BDC dial. Like many such systems, they provided several turrets marked in yards for various trajectories, with a list which loads worked with each turret. It worked, sort of. The big problem, again, was accurate ranging.

Bushnell suggested pairing the BDC scopes with their mirror rangefinder, which worked on the convergent principle featured in artillery rangefinders. You looked through a viewfinder on one end of the scope, finding two images of the target, due to an angled mirror at the other end. You turned a dial until the two images merged, and read the range on a dial.

But the rangefinder was maybe 18 inches long, which wasn’t enough for accurate readings beyond about 200 yards–where the system might actually be useful. Plus, the exposed elevation turret didn’t have firm clicks, so tended the “reset” itself in the field, as I learned during my first hunt with the scope. I had the dial set on 250 yards, just about the range to the pronghorn buck I stalked in the Missouri Breaks.

I lay prone and shot, whereupon the buck looked around, obviously untouched. I shot again, and he started trotting away, then slowed and stopped. After the third miss he started running, and at somewhere around 300 yards I held about 5-6 in front of his chest whereupon the bullet broke his spine behind the shoulders. This was because the scope’s dial had somehow twirled to 325 yards, not 250.

Today’s dialing scopes usually have much firmer clicks, and scopes specifically designed for hunting often have capped turrets. This makes sense, as just about any modern bolt-action big game round shoots flat enough to aim in the middle of a pronghorn’s chest out to 250 yards, when the scope’s sighted-in two inches high at 100. At longer ranges there’s usually time to unscrew the elevation cap and make an adjustment.

Field-adjustable turrets would seem to bypass the need for multi-point reticles, yet most dialing scopes have some sort of fairly fancy reticle, for a couple of reasons. First, very few long-range hunters dial for windage, partly because wind often varies somewhat over several seconds, and a dialed-in compensation may not remain correct. Instead most scopes have windage hashmarks on the horizontal crosshair, so the shooter can instantly choose the correct hashmark for that moment’s wind.

Some long-range shooters also use range hashmarks on the vertical crosshair to correct for misses, and in fact some hunters take what are essentially “ranging” shots at distant animals. Or rather, at some object several yards from an animal, to see where the bullet actually lands. At really long range this usually doesn’t disturb the animal much, if at all, and as a result subsequent shots can be adjusted for error.

I haven’t done this with big game, and have quite a bit with prairie dogs, though usually I aim right at the dog for the first shot. I’ve found the best reticles for this work have LOTS of aiming points in some sort of grid pattern. In relatively steady winds, consistent hits can be made at pretty long ranges even on PD’s. The Ramshot powder people once offered a varmint scope with such a reticle, and it’s still on Eileen’s primary varmint centerfire, a heavy-barreled .223. It makes consistently hitting dogs (meaning more get hit than missed) possible out to 600 yards in modest breezes.

Of course, these fancier reticles can’t be produced with wire, the reason most multi-point reticles are etched on plain glass. This is a pretty good system, though despite what some shooters believe, etched reticles can still glare like wire reticles when aiming away from the sun.

They can also break, though not often. One scope manufacturer used to make steel-tube scopes, because they were theoretically stronger. One of their guys confessed to me years ago that they discontinued steel-tubes scopes because etched reticles broke more often, apparently because steel transmitted more force to the reticle than aluminum tubes, both during firing and if the rifle got dropped.

One other minor disadvantage of etched reticles is they slightly reduce the amount of light transmitted through the scope, by introducing two more glass surfaces. This doesn’t amount to much, and in modern, multicoated scopes, a little extra brightness isn’t as valuable as many hunters think. Instead, the ability to see the reticle is more important, and our grandfathers discovered with post reticles.

All of which is one reason more scopes have illuminated reticles these days. As reticles have grown more complex, they’ve also gotten finer, often just as fine as very thin crosshairs. The common solution is to install a tiny light-source inside the scope, which went turned on lights up the etched reticle, usually in red. It helps to be able to adjust the amount of light, because a too-bright reticle can overwhelm the image of the target.

Today’s batteries are so good they’ll often last for years when operating illuminated reticles, but another solution is to have the reticle itself glow. More than one company has produced such scopes, but probably the best-known is Trijicon, which offers several models with aiming points made of a combination of tritium and fiber optics. Brightness is either self-adjusting to available light, or manually adjusted with a sliding, waterproof window on the side of the scope next to the reticle. They work very well–I’ve used Trijicon AccuPoints from Alaska to Africa–but usually offer only a single illuminated aiming point.

Burris Eliminator scopes have an internal laser rangefinder, which lights up one of 96 dots for shooting at longer ranges. However, this New Mexico mule deer was only 101 yards away–but the scope also features a conventional multi-point reticle, so worked fine.

Yet another interesting variation is Burris’s Eliminator scopes, which have an interior laser rangefinder that lights up one of 96 tiny dots along the vertical crosshair, which dot according to the range. The scope is easily programmed for the velocity and ballistic coefficient of your bullet, and is remarkably accurate, since each dot is only 1/3 MOA from the next. The dot’s illumination isn’t adjustable, but they’re so small they don’t overwhelm the target in dim light.

Personally, after using a bunch of different reticles over the decades, these days I’m pretty well satisfied with plex-type reticle, perhaps with an illuminated dot in the middle or, in a dialing scope, windage hashmarks on the horizontal crosshair. You might want something else, and luckily today there are far more choices than crosshairs, post or dot.

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Ask John Barsness Questions About “RIFLE SCOPE RETICLES”

John’s new book Modern Hunting Optics and other great stuff can be ordered online at www.riflesandrecipes.com.

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ROCKY GIBBS AND HIS WILDCATS

24HOURCAMPFIRE — Sat, 07 Dec 2019 09:17:15 +0000

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ROCKY GIBBS AND HIS WILDCATS

by Wayne van Zwoll

Hot-rodding the .30-06, this Idaho wildcatter claimed speeds that sent handloaders to their presses and challenged P.O. Ackley’s Improved dynasty!

Re-chambered to .30 Gibbs, this Springfield 03A3 can deliver the ballistic muscle of the .300 H&H.

IN A GUN-SHOP not long ago, I picked up an 03A3 Springfield dating, I reckoned, to the 1960s. The barrel was original, minus the front sight. Beuhler rings clenched a Weaver scope branded J.C. Higgins. Simple but not crude, the sporting stock was of plain walnut, with the ventilated pad of the period. Tightly inletted and well finished, the wood cradled my cheek and led my eye to the crosswire. Barrel inscription: “.30 Gibbs.” The proprietor willingly obliged an offer. He smiled as I left with a rifle old enough to draw Social Security, re-chambered for a cartridge few hunters have even heard of.

But I had. In fact, Rocky Gibbs lived not far from my current digs. He was a pioneer in an era of pioneers who gave us fast, flat-shooting cartridges – men whose experiments and time at the bench and on the mountain shaped the modern hunting rifle. The old Springfield in my hand was a piece of history….

Wayne paid little for this rifle, with its ancient Weaver scope. But the stock fits, the action is smooth.

DURING a March snowstorm in 1955, rifle-maker Rocky Gibbs moved from Richmond, California to Viola, Idaho, where he’d bought a 35-acre tract laid out to accommodate a 500-yard rifle range. In his shop, Rocky re-established Gibbs Rifle Products and expanded a series of cartridges on the .30-06 case with the shoulder moved forward. Fashioning a Gibbs hull, handloaders had to create a false or temporary shoulder with dies to maintain headspace before fire-forming. Or they could spring for the Rocky Gibbs Wildcat Case Forming Tool, a hydraulic press, to help with this operation.

Rocky Gibbs moved to Idaho – not far from this elk country – and established his business in 1955.

Even before his Idaho move, Rocky had hot-rodded his Remington 721 in .270, dismissing P.O. Ackley’s Improved 40-degree shoulder at the original shoulder location. A Keith Francis reamer that cut a long chamber with a 35-degree angle to a .250 neck yielded the .270 Gibbs. Evidently Rocky set a record with this cartridge at a Richmond match in 1953. The following year, he would add six more cartridges to a proprietary stable that would change little over the next couple of decades.

The .240 Gibbs, most easily formed from .25-06 brass, is among the most enduring of Rocky’s wildcats – though he made relatively few rifles so chambered. He recorded over 3,600 fps with 75-grain bullets, 3,500 with 85-grain bullets and 3,250 with 105-grain Speers. Rocky hailed the .25 Gibbs as the only wildcat that shot flatter than his .240 and compared it with the .257 Weatherby. His records showed 3,900 fps from 75-grain bullets and nearly 3,550 with 100-grain spitzers.

Rocky claimed his .270 Gibbs was “the best all-around cartridge for a handloader.” Verily, Jack O’Connor acknowledged its merits in Outdoor Life: “As far as I can tell, Brother Gibbs doesn’t do it with mirrors.” By Rocky’s reckoning, 63 grains of IMR 4350 in his .270 kicked 130-grain bullets downrange at 3,430 fps, placing the wildcat in league with the .270 Weatherby Magnum and leaving the popular .270 Winchester in the dust. While Rocky also championed his 7mm, and claimed 3,300 fps with a 139-grain bullet, the round never sold well – an odd result, given the rising popularity of belted 7mms at the time.

The .30 Gibbs earned some notoriety as a poor man’s magnum. Francis Sell wrote about it in his excellent book on deer hunting. Rocky massaged 3,000 fps with 180-grain bullets from the .30, matching factory loads from the .300 H&H Magnum. The .30 Gibbs was much more popular than Rocky’s 8mm, which he considered a brilliant way to salvage 8×57 Mausers that came Stateside on the heels of World War II. The .338 Gibbs joined Rocky’s line sometime after 1958. But any success it might have had was scotched by Winchester’s announcement that year of its .338 Magnum.

Several steps shape .30 Gibbs hulls from .30-06 brass. A new “false” shoulder precedes fire-forming.

Gibbs had a flair for the dramatic and was openly concerned about his data being pirated. He kept his test records secret, evidently instructing his wife to burn them just before his death from leukemia, at age 58, in 1973. Listed velocities for Gibbs wildcats are best approached with caution.

With Parker Ackley and other wildcatters, Manolis Aamoen Gibbs chased – and claimed – higher performance in cases reconfigured for more capacity. He experimented with novel handloading methods and published a booklet titled “Front Ignition Loading Technique,” detailing duplex charges from work by Charlie O’Neil, Elmer Keith and Don Hopkins of OKH fame. But the Gibbs legacy has as much to do with economics as with ballistics. With surplus infantry rifles and cartridges formed from GI hulls, Rocky Gibbs helped shooters push bullets very fast, to kill game farther along their arc.

FINDING THAT 03A3 was my first step to handloading for a Gibbs cartridge. After ordering a set of .30 Gibbs dies from Redding, I scrounged some .35 Whelen brass – the simplest route to a .30 Gibbs case but unavailable in Rocky’s time (Remington adopted the .35 Whelen in 1988, the first year handloaders could buy commercial brass). To get a feel for the way hunters in the ‘60s had to make .30 Gibbs ammo, I necked up additional .30-06 cases in a .338-06 sizing die, another handful in a .35 Whelen die. One pass opened the 30-caliber necks to .35, but the bump to .338 was easier.

Commercial .338-06 or .35 Whelen brass can be run through a .30 Gibbs die to prep for fire-forming.

With the full-length Gibbs sizing die, I then necked all .338- and .358-diameter necks to .308 to form a new shoulder forward of the original. This neck-up-neck-down process is necessary, as headspace measure for the Gibbs round differs from that of the .30-06. Fire-forming unaltered .30-06 ammo in a .30 Gibbs chamber causes a condition of excessive headspace and is dangerous!

For the final, fire-forming step, I weighed mild 50-grain charges of IMR 4350 behind 165-grain bullets. Cases extracted without a hitch, the new shoulders perfectly formed where the false shoulders had been. The original shoulders remained only as bright rings on the case bodies. I ran 20 more hulls through the dies and, in a fit of exuberance, hiked powder charges to yield velocities 100 fps higher than those of a .30-06. No problem. These case-forming loads routinely shot into a minute of angle!

I next scrounged a variety of powders I thought might work well in the Gibbs with bullets of 150 to 180 grains. The attached chart shows some results.

I’m still experimenting with hunting loads in the .30 Gibbs. Come fall, that Springfield will return to the hunting trail. I can’t wait!

Sidebar: Headspace

WHEN YOU PULL a trigger, many important events happen fast. The striker’s blow crushes the face of the primer against the anvil inside, detonating the shock-sensitive priming mix pinched between them. Flame jets through the flash-hole in the primer pocket, igniting the gunpowder in the case to produce gas. The ductile brass case expands under gas pressure, ironing itself to the chamber wall as the bullet is thrust from the case into the bore. At the same time, gas pushes the case head against the bolt.

Peak gas pressure can exceed 30 tons per square inch. But the case doesn’t respond uniformly to it. The brass tapers, from thick at the web (brass around the flash-hole) to thin at the neck. As the front of the hull irons itself to the chamber up front, gas pressure has progressively less effect at the rear. The base of the hull just above the web remains near its original diameter.

Now, if the case is held tight to the bolt face, everything is OK. The case head simply absorbs the rearward thrust of gas without moving, as it is supported by the bolt face. But it’s unusual for an unfired cartridge to fit tight against the bolt face, because it would be hard to chamber – a press fit. A cartridge a tad too long would not chamber. So chambers are cut generously, to ensure all factory-loaded ammo will chamber. But too big a reach between the bolt face and the point in the chamber that stops forward motion of a cartridge causes a condition of excess headspace. That’s not good at all.

Headspace is the distance from the face of the locked bolt to a “datum line” in the chamber that arrests forward movement of the cartridge.

Rifle chambers, including throats, are cut to permit minimum case stretch but accept all factory loads.

The striker’s blow pushes the cartridge forward until it contacts the datum point in the chamber. Case expansion sticks it there. The case head isn’t stuck because it is thick and doesn’t expand as much, so it moves rearward to meet the bolt face. The ductile brass case stretches – mainly just above the web. Excessvie headspace permits excessive stretching and case separation. Think of a rubber band pulled too far. Repeated firings “work harden” a case, reducing its ability to stretch. Think of an envelope clasp bent back and forth. When a hull splits, gas jets into the chamber faster than a bullet. It zips along the bolt race, through the striker hole, into the magazine well. It can find your eye faster than you can blink. To ensure against such catastrophe, use only ammunition that meets headspace tolerances in your chamber!

THE TERM “HEADSPACE” originated when all metallic cartridges had rims, so the first measurements were made only at the head. Headspace is still gauged from the bolt face, but the datum point varies with cartridge design. A straight rimless case (.45 ACP) headspaces at the mouth, because that’s what stops the round from going farther forward. On a belted magnum, the front edge of the belt serves the same purpose as the rim of a .30-30. The datum line for rimless bottleneck cartridges like the .30-06 is on the shoulder. Ditto for rebated cases (the .284). Semi-rimmed rounds theoretically headspace on the rim. Sometimes (as with the .38 Super Automatic) the rim is insufficient given action tolerances needed for sure function. The case mouth then serves as a secondary stop. The semi-rimmed .220 Swift has a more substantial lip; but most handloaders prefer to neck-size only, so after a first firing, the case headspaces on the shoulder.

Headspace for the .30-06 Improved (left) is same as for the .30-06. The Gibbs shoulder moves ahead.

Gunsmiths measure headspace with steel “go” and “no go” gauges, inserted in the chamber. The “go” gauge is typically .004 to .006 shorter than the “no go” gauge for rimless and belted cartridges. The bolt should close on a “go” gauge, not on a “no go” gauge. Theoretically, if the bolt closes on a “no go” gauge, the barrel should be set back a thread, then rechambered to achieve proper headspace. However, some chambers that accept “no go” gauges may still serviceable with ordinary ammo. The “field” gauge, seldom seen now, has been used to check these chambers. It’s roughly .002 longer than a “no go” gauge.

If you’re handloading for only one bolt-action rifle, you’re smart to neck-size only, rather than full-length-size. The brass will move less with each firing, and last longer. Full-length sizing is necessary if you’re switching to a rifle with a slightly smaller chamber, and it helps ensure function in autoloading and lever- and slide-action rifles with anemic camming. Some hunters full-length-size all cases for a hunt, to guard against jams in adverse conditions.

Neck-sizing makes sense with belted cases, because chambers for them are often cut generously in the shoulder area. The critical dimension is the distance from bolt face to belt face (.220 to .224, “go” to “no go”). Full-length-sizing belted magnums, you reduce head-to-neck span considerably, so the hull stretches a lot at each firing. Eventually you’ll see a white ring around the case ahead of the belt. If you insert a wire with an “L” bend at the end, you may detect an indentation there – thinning of the case wall. Discard that hull!

Rechambering rifles to Improved cartridges should not alter headspace. That’s why you can fire factory ammo in an Improved chamber safely. Wildcat rounds with shoulders moved forward (the Gibbs series) must be fashioned in steps to prevent a condition of excess headspace.

Preliminary data, .30 Gibbs

These are not recommended loads! Rifle bores and chambers differ. Proceed with caution!

.30 Gibbs (case-forming) in 24-inch 03A3

Powder Bullet Velocity

59 H380 130 Speer HP 2940

63 WW 760 150 Hornady 2930

53 IMR 4064 150 Sierra 2927

62 IMR 4350 150 Hornady 2920

53 H380 165 Speer 2719

61 IMR 4350 165 Sierra 2815

61 WW 760 165 Speer 2855

64 RL-19 180 Pwr Point 2819

61 WW 760 180 Core-Lokt 2793

62 RL-19 180 Core-Lokt 2630

.30 Gibbs (fully formed) in 24-inch 03A3

58 Big Game 165 X (blue) 2830

62 WW 760 165 Hornady 2995

59 Hybd 100V 180 Kodiak Bd 2800

61 IMR 4350 180 Core-Lokt 2748

64 RL-19 180 A-Frame 2870

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LESSONS LEARNED FROM GUN WRITING

24HOURCAMPFIRE — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 22:34:04 +0000

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LESSONS LEARNED FROM GUN WRITING

by John Barsness

African “culls” provide lots of information on cartridges and bullets; during this month-long hunt a dozen hunters took 185 animals. This gemsbok was taken with the then-new Nosler AccuBond in 7mm Dakota. Despite being a cull, it qualified for Rowland Ward!

LIKE MANY gun writers I got into the profession during mid-life, after establishing a freelance career writing about other stuff from fly-fishing to Western history. It wasn’t until around age 40 that gun writing started turning into more of my income, partly because before my mid-30s I couldn’t afford to satisfy my apparently infinite desire for sporting firearms. After starting to buy and use more rifles and shotguns, I also started learning how little knowledge had been acquired when sticking to basic hunting tools.

During the low point in my early “collecting” of hunting guns, my already modest array was divorce-trimmed to a Remington 870 12-gauge magnum, Marlin Model 81 .22 rimfire, and a Ruger 77 .30-06. That’s still a good combination for hunting edible game in North America, but eventually I also wanted a real centerfire varmint rifle, rather than getting by with “dual purpose” cartridges such as the .243 Winchester, along with a wider variety of shotguns and, especially, more big game rifles.

Among the first additions were a Remington 700 in .223 Remington, and a pretty fancy AyA XXV side-by-side 12-gauge. These started teaching new lessons, ranging from more accurate handloading techniques to the fact that a “nice” shotgun doesn’t necessarily shoot better than a plain one — especially if its balance doesn’t particularly match its owner.

Eventually I acquired enough experience with various guns to start publishing more articles in gun magazines. Among the first were Rifle and Handloader, which appear six times a year in alternating months. After selling a few pieces to then-editor Dave Scovill, I was astonished one day when he called and asked what I “planned” to write that month. Until then there was no hint that I was expected to write for every issue, but nothing brightens a freelance writer’s life like steady money. I quickly came up with a suitable idea, and almost as quickly mailed off the finished article.

Gun writing often helps acquire knowledge because some hunts involve several other hunters, providing information beyond our own. This elk hunt took place on a ranch about an hour from my Montana home, with four hunters taking 6-point bulls.

Around that time I started getting invited on free or discounted hunts in various places, whether by booking agents, outfitters or manufacturers. These helped me gain even more knowledge both about gear and various animals, though after hunting in Montana for the first 35 years of my life, at first there weren’t many surprises. My native state contains a bunch of different big game animals and upland birds, and the waterfowling ain’t bad either. The terrain also includes high mountains and lowland plains — which itself varies considerably from sagebrush desert to what’s essentially Midwestern farm country, with thick deciduous forest along the rivers.

The hunting started to become more intriguing when the trips started expanding beyond the 48 contiguous United States, to northern North America and southern Africa, Europe, South America and islands like New Zealand. But even those trips didn’t astonish me as much as some other gun writers encountered along the way, who apparently had decided long ago that they knew everything, and not just about hunting rifles. One complained in more than one foreign country that he couldn’t find “a decent cheeseburger and fries.”

One of my earliest travel hunts took place in Colorado, which if you mentally subtract about five million people isn’t much different from Montana. It was a basic deer hunt on the eastern plains, for either a whitetail or mule deer buck. This was familiar to me in just about every way, but I’ve also always found that even familiar hunting teaches us new lessons every year. One supposed reason for the hunt was “field testing” a new premium bullet, and since a dozen hunters were involved plenty of new information went into my data bank.

I took my buck — a pretty good 5×5 whitetail — relatively early in the hunt, then immediately started going along with other hunters, partly to gain experience and partly because I like being outdoors in October. However, as other hunters took deer it became obvious some considered the hunting as something to get done quickly, so they could do something else indoors. One even arranged to fly home as soon as he got his deer.

I also like to go hunting with friends like my buddy Pete Jackson. We met on a Canadian caribou hunt in 1993, and Pete eventually came to Montana to supposedly hunt mule deer, but could not pass up this whitetail!

I ended up accompanying four other hunters. One buck was a mule deer, one a muley/whitetail hybrid (confirmed by one of the writers, also a professional wildlife biologist), and two were whitetails. The last was the biggest whitetail taken during the hunt, and also happened to be what we often call in Montana a “prairie buck.” Instead of finding it along one of the brush-bordered creeks and rivers, we were supposedly glassing for mule deer, and instead found the whitetail bedded the top of a grassy ridge where the tallest “cover” was knee-high sagebrush and yucca.

This astonished some of the other hunters, all from east of the Mississippi River, even though the outfitter had given a short talk the night we gathered at our motel, explaining whitetail bucks could be found far from anything many hunters consider appropriate cover. In fact, he’d specifically advised them to keep their minds open when his guides spent time glassing open country.

Despite this, one of the Easterners had insisted on sitting in a tree stand for the first two days of the hunt, in the only sizeable cottonwood tree along one of the sparsely wooded creeks. He “knew” that’s where whitetail bucks would live, but never saw one.

I also got to see how the new bullets worked, in three different cartridges. We’d all been issued the same model of Browning A-Bolt, but I drew a 7mm Remington Magnum and the guys I accompanied used .270s and .30-06s. The bullets were Winchester Fail Safes, before they turned into Combined Technology Fail Safes, which worked very much like the several monometal “petal” bullets made by various companies today. The front half was a hollow-pointed copper alloy, and the rear end had a lead core, protected from deformation by a steel cup.

While the Fail Safes killed deer, with lung shots they did not usually drop them as quickly as more conventional softnose bullets. My buck, for example, was shot while I sneaked slowly through timber during a moderate blizzard, along the one real riverbottom in the area. The snow softened the sound of my feet, and limited visibility, both helping me get within offhand range of the bedded buck before he stood up broadside. The bullet landed just behind the shoulder, and he immediately ran into a cattail thicket along the frozen river — in the process jumping a bedded coyote, which ran out the opposite side of the cattails. For a nanosecond I though the coyote was the deer, but the buck had died inside the thicket, around 75 yards from where it had been hit. The Fail Safe exited, of course, so also left a decent blood trail, which with the fresh snow made the buck easy to find. (To illustrate how unpredictable plains deer can be, after the outfitter and I dragged my whitetail to his vehicle and starting driving back toward the highway, we ran into a very big mule deer buck in the same stretch of riverbottom timber, rather than out in the wide-open spaces where he “should” have been.)

A 300-grain .375 Fail Safe bullet left a fist-sized hole as it exited this Botswana buffalo. This might sound good, but Fail Safes and similar “petal” bullets are why many African professional hunters now advise buffalo clients to use expanding bullets that DON’T penetrate so deeply, to prevent wounding another buffalo.

After that I took quite a few animals with Fail Safes in both North America and Africa, including a big Alaskan moose and Botswana Cape buffalo. They worked particularly well on such really big game, and in my experience were the most consistently accurate of the deep-penetrating, petal-expanding bullets during the 1990s. But after Barnes put circumferential grooves around their X-Bullet in 2004, naming the result the Triple-Shock, the more complex and expensive Fail Safe could not compete.

The last industry hunt I attended where Fail Safes were used was on the King Ranch in Texas, where 15 hunters took 30 nilgai, a bull and cow each, along with several feral pigs. The main point of the hunt was the brand-new .270 WSM, and all the factory ammo was loaded with 140-grain Fail Safes.

In that instance the people who thought they already knew everything about nilgai hunting were not only a couple of writers but the guides, whose outfitter boss normally demanded nothing less than a .300 Winchester Magnum on nilgai hunts. The mere mention of the numeral .270 made him wince.

By the end of the hunt most of the doubters changed their minds, since the “little” Fail Safes worked great on nilgai, including several big bulls, generally considered very hard to kill. However, a couple of people remained skeptical despite all the evidence, because they’d decided long ago that any sub-.30 caliber cartridge was inadequate for game much larger than deer.

I have seen the same sort of thing happen on enough other hunts to expect some doubt despite the results of the field testing, whether from people who’d already made up their minds, or did not shoot very well. On a pronghorn hunt in Wyoming, one writer insisted the bullets in the factory 7mm-08 Remington ammunition he used were not expanding and hence “penciling through.” He came to this conclusion after shooting a buck several times before it fell.

That evening that writer left the usual post-hunt social session early, apparently exhausted by his ordeal with the defective bullets. His guide then told us the guy had shot the buck around the edges of the vitals, and the exit holes indicated the bullets expanded normally. (If you’re curious, they were 139-grain Hornady Interlock Spire Points, which I’ve never had any trouble with in 30 years of use on game from pronghorn to caribou, in cartridges from the 7mm-08 to 7mm Remington Magnum.)

The point of all this is keeping an open mind — which I try to do, especially when confronted with “evidence” from gun writers who made up their mind about everything long ago. An old example would be Elmer Keith. Now, I love to read Keith’s writing (the reason for owning all his books), partly because he was very good at telling hunting tales, and partly because I liked his lifestyle — to the point where I now live within a few miles of where his family ranched in Montana.

But it’s also apparent that Elmer made up his mind about big game cartridges even before he started writing about firearms. He did modify his ideas slightly over the years, such as when he switched from the .35 Whelen to his similar wildcat .333 OKH, because of the .333’s higher sectional density and ballistic coefficient. But he apparently never grasped the advantages of “premium” bullets, because he’d grown up with cast bullets and cup-and-cores, so continued to use and recommend larger caliber cartridges long after better bullets allowed smaller-caliber cartridges to match or even exceed their performance.

This prejudice due to early experience isn’t uncommon among humans. Since around the middle of the 20^th century, more advances in hunting rifles and their accessories have occurred than in the similar length of time after practical smokeless powders appeared in the 1880s. Yet many of us — especially hunters of my generation — still cling to what we learned in our youth.

This is understandable, because experiences when young tend to leave larger impressions, the reason when many older hunters ask about the “best” rifle scopes, they’re asking about optical quality, though even most of today’s relatively inexpensive scopes have finer optics than the scopes older hunters grew up with. Instead the emphasis in 21^st-century scopes has turned to reliable mechanics, something the scopes we grew up using often lacked.

Similarly, some of us retain the same notions about rifles, cartridges and bullets we learned in our 20s and 30s, often partly from our fathers and grandfathers. For that matter, many even retain the same notions about vehicles. One of my best local buddies (I’ve known him since we were in our 30s) has always purchased the same brand of pickup truck favored by his late father. These were pretty reliable, if unexciting, pickups when we were growing up, but the brand then went through a period of being not very good. My buddy still bought ‘em, and occasionally even complained about getting a “lemon,” but refused to consider any other brand. Luckily, eventually the family brand got better again.

Some other gun writers regard the generous opportunities of the profession as something like a college graduate finally entering the “real” world, and starting to apply early training while learning on the job. This often results in a wider array of solutions to specific problems. All of this is why I try to retain an open mind, even though (like other hunters) I have my own prejudices about rifles, cartridge, bullets, scopes etc.

One of the biggest lessons learned early in my hunting career came from Dave Scovill, who had recently rejected an article by another writer, about how the .308 Winchester is the greatest general-use big game cartridge in America. I happen to somewhat agree — but the guy almost never hunted with any other cartridge. As a result the article lacked perspective. Instead it consisted of hunts where he’d killed big game with the .308 (something possible with a great many rounds), so was not very interesting, breaking one cardinal rule of any magazine writing.

All of which is why I try not to pre-judge, thanks to having the opportunity not only to do a lot of shooting and hunting myself, along even more observation of other shooters and hunters. When some reader contacts me, asking what’s the best big game bullet out of several he’s considering, I usually do not answer with a certain recommendation, but instead describe how each one works, based on my experience. He can then use this information (if he wants) to help make up his mind.

This why my primary prairie dog round is now the .17 Hornady Hornet, rather than the .223 Remington I, and just about everybody else, used 30 years ago. The .17 with plastic-tipped bullets works just as well out to around 300 yards, where 90% of prairie dogs are shot, with less expense, and recoil so light you can watch bullets land (whether hits or misses) through a high-magnification scope. It’s also why the .223 Remington is mostly used these days for ranges beyond 300 yards — with a 1-8 twist barrel and plastic-tipped bullets weighing at least 75 grains.

It’s also why an ancient German cartridge named the 9.3×62 pretty much replaced the .338 Winchester and .375 H&H Magnums for my “medium bore” hunting almost 20 years ago. I discovered (thanks to an even older gun writer who also kept an open mind) that modern bullets and powders allowed the 9.3×62 to match the field performance of the .338 and .375 when using 250-300 grain bullets — but with five rounds in the typical bolt-action magazine, instead of three, and less recoil.

Gun writers often have to test new stuff, including today’s supposedly improved rifle powders. The trend today is toward temperature-stable powders that include decoppering agents, which I’ve tested enough to know they really do work.

Because many of today’s bullets and powders didn’t exist before I started writing about guns, I’ve had to try them, not just once but a number of times, to gain that knowledge of both tiny varmint rounds and Keithian cartridges. It’s also why I continue to try other new stuff, even if some of it runs against my preconceived notions, because I believe (perhaps somewhat naively) that gun writing should be objective journalism.

The late, great gun writer John Wootters once told me it was not, because he’d done “real” journalism for a big Texas newspaper. Instead he insisted gun writing was entertainment. To a certain extent I agree, because any commercial writing should be entertaining on some level. But non-fiction should also contain new information, which is impossible when writers have already made up their minds before trying something new.

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Ask John Barsness Questions About “LESSONS LEARNED FROM GUN WRITING”

John’s new book Modern Hunting Optics and other great stuff can be ordered online at www.riflesandrecipes.com.

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DEER RIFLES THAT ENDURE

24HOURCAMPFIRE — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 19:28:38 +0000

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Deer Rifles That Endure

by Wayne van Zwoll

It’s uniquely American, and common even among casual hunters. The best of its type are timeless.

Short, slab-sided lever-actions with straight grips make ideal saddle rifles. This 94 has seen hard use.

ITS STEEL SOUL tells you a rifle is hardware. It is often treated as such, aging in the closet or wedged behind the pickup seat. A box of ammo for such rifles lasts years.

Some rifles are better treated – as if there was a pulse beneath the metal. They’re stored carefully, handled often, fired even when there’s no game in season.

“I got it from a sheepherder for fifty bucks.” My pal handed me the Winchester, a saddle-ring 94 carbine that in new condition would have sparked a bidding war among collectors. It was, alas, hard-used, its stock finish gone, the metal silvered. Screw heads were badly chewed. The bore was dark as the inside of a stovepipe, almost surely pitted. “Take it to the range. See if it shoots.”

More than six million Winchester 94s have been sold, most in .30-30. This one retailed for $89.50.

I did. That .25-35 drilled a 1-inch triangle at 100 yards. As I can’t see open sights that well, I had to lay such results to blind luck. Then again, some rifles have magic. Deer rifles, especially. Like the 1899 Savage I clutched last fall, flat on the prairie, sucking sand behind short grass as a buck eased my way….

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By the end of the 18^th century, the flintlock rifle of the Northeast had taken a recognizable shape. The “Kentucky” was long and lean, with brass furnishings. Its small bore conserved lead. Oddly enough, its archetype came from Pennsylvania shops run by German immigrants. As settlement pushed past thick forests with few deer into a wilderness with bigger game and fewer gunsmiths, this long-rifle became the “Southern rifle,” hurling heavier balls. Its spawn, the Plains rifle, shared its iron fittings but had a shorter, big-bore barrel for easy carry on horseback and lethal hits on bison and grizzlies. During the brief period of the Rendezvous (1820s), Ohio brothers Jake and Sam Hawken built the most famous of these rifles in their St. Louis shop. Hawken-style rifles remained popular well into the era of repeating rifles.

One of those repeaters would establish the form of America’s deer rifle.

In the late 1840s Walter Hunt developed a lever rifle with a pill-box device to advance primers. A tube under the barrel held a stack of “rocket balls” – hollow-base bullets with black powder secured in the cavities by paper caps. Gunsmithing by Lewis Jennings, Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson improved this “Volitional Repeater.” Oliver Fisher Winchester was one of 40 New York investors who bought into the project, and was named to head a new company. When it floundered, Winchester purchased all assets and then assigned bright young B. Tyler Henry to overhaul the Hunt repeater. The brass-frame Henry rifle served Union troops during the Civil War, then fathered the Model 1866 that saved Oliver Winchester’s New Haven Arms Company from bankruptcy. John M. Browning fashioned a stronger lock-up, after his dropping-block single-shot action – and designed for Winchester its 1886, 1892 and 1894 rifles.

John Browning designed the Winchester 1886 rifle, using vertical locking lugs per his single-shot.

In its day the Henry must have pleased deer hunters. But its 216-grain bullet, driven by 26 grains of black powder, clocked only 1,025 fps. Hawken muzzle-loaders were far more potent! Ditto the single-shot Remington Rolling Block, Sharps 1874 and (Browning’s) Winchester 1885 cartridge rifles. Still, the lever-action was slim and lightweight, and spewed a tube-full of firepower at a headlong rate. When Colt chambered its Model 1873 Peacemaker revolver for the .44-40 cartridge Winchester had introduced in its 1873 lever rifle, hunters and homesteaders flocked to buy both.

The advent of smokeless powder in the early ‘90s blessed hunters with new rifles and cartridges. The .44-40 appeared in the short-action Winchester 1892 and Marlin 1894 rifles. Winchester announced its Model 1894 rifle in October of that year, in .32-40 and .38-55, both black-powder rounds for Ballard target rifles. The .30-30 and .25-35 appeared as smokeless chamberings in August, 1895, when the New Haven firm first cataloged nickel-steel barrels. The .32 Special joined the roster in 1902. With the .30-30, the .32 Special long outlived the 1894’s original offerings, leaving the line in 1973.

The Marlin 1893 arrived with Winchester’s 1894, boasted the same chamberings, a solid-top receiver.

Marlin’s Model 1893 arrived just before Winchester’s 1894. It was bored for the same cartridges: .32-40-165 and .38-55-255 (a .375-bore round). Marlin soon added the .30-30 and .32 Special – also the .25-36 Marlin, fashioned in 1895 by William V. Lowe, who called it the .25-37. The Marlin’s solid-top receiver made it more rigid and weather-proof than the Winchester’s. Later, it would be hailed by hunters who wanted to mount scopes low and securely over the bore. Model 1893 rifles first retailed for $13.75. That, brethren, is less than you’ll pay now to fill a five-gallon gasoline can. The well-used 1893 I bought a few years ago cost me well into four figures, without an interrupting decimal!

By the time Marlin announced its new Model 36 lever-action in 1936, the 1893 and Winchester’s 1894 had shed their black-powder rounds. Marlin listed only the .30-30 and .32 Special in the 36. The .32 Special’s 170-grain .321 bullet does just what the .30-30’s 170-grain .307 or .308 bullet does, aloft and in deer. But some hunters favored the .32.

Ed Broder did. On November 25, 1926, he and two pals drove a 1914 Model T 100 miles from Edmonton to Chip Lake, Alberta. They stopped at a sawmill camp to hire a team of horses and a sleigh, reaching the lake cabin in a foot of snow. Keen to hunt, Broder grabbed his rifle and in heavy timber soon came upon a large deer track. He stayed with the prints for a half mile, to a fresh bed. The deer could not be far away. “I tracked him into a jackpine swamp,” he reported.” There I found where two moose had crossed. I had to decide between moose and deer.” The moose would likely take longer to reel in, and limited daylight remained. So Ed chose the deer, trailing it with care. Presently, in a clearing, he spied the buck. The animal was facing away “I’d have to take a spine shot. So I waited until the animal raised its head, then pulled up my .32 Special and fired.” The buck collapsed. “I thought: What big antlers!” Ninety years later, Ed Broder’s Alberta mule deer remains, by Boone and Crockett measure, the best of its kind ever taken.

Over a century of competition for Winchester lever rifles has come from Marlin. Here: a Model 336.

My 1893 Marlin is a .32 Special, with pre-WW 1 upgrades. It has a pistol grip and shotgun butt, a 23-inch half-round, half-octagon barrel over a 2/3 magazine. It’s also a takedown rifle, with quarter-turn, interrupted-thread breeching. The metal has aged gracefully, leaving little blue, but no pits or scars either. Straight-grain walnut shows neither crack nor oil stain. There’s no play in the barrel when cinched snug. At the range, it performs better than a glance into the storm-drain bore would have you believe. To check zero with its open sights, I pasted a bullseye at 50 yards, then thumbed in 165-grain Hornady FTX loads. They drilled a .55-inch delta. Magic. That group was particularly satisfying because long ago I’d been fed the old saw that .32 Special bores failed rapidly once they lost their edge. While their 1-in-16 rifling sheds black powder fouling better than does the 1-in-12 twist in .30-30 bores, “ it’s barely adequate to stabilize bullets. A .32 Special’s like a sheep: just waiting to die. A .30-30 barrel shoots straight until you can’t see rifling at all.” Today you might call that fake news.

Another fine deer round too soon dismissed was the .303 Savage, which appeared in 1895. Three years earlier the Krag-Jorgensen, a bolt-action in an age defined by bolt-actions, had beaten Savage’s No. 1 hammerless lever rifle in ordnance trials at Governor’s Island, New York. The Krag would spend just a decade in uniform; offspring of the Savage No. 1 would last a century! Trimming the No. 1 for hunters, 35-year-old Savage pared magazine capacity to five and opened the lever for three fingers. In April, 1894, he founded the Savage Repeating Arms Company in Utica, New York. The next year Marlin Firearms built the first Savage Model 1895s in .303 Savage.

The 1895 and 1899 Savage appeared early on in .303 Savage, which in 1920 gave way to the .300.

The .303’s 190-grain softpoint at 2,100 fps hit harder than its competitors and was soon toppling moose and grizzlies. In 1899 Savage tweaked his lever rifle, a year later chambering it to .30 WCF. The .25-35, .32-40 and .38-55 followed in 1903 (essentially reversing their order in the 1893 Marlin and 1894 Winchester!). The .303 gave a little ground to the .30-30, more in 1913 to the frisky .250/3000, wildcatted by Charles Newton for the 1899. What killed the .303 was the .300 Savage, which drove 180-grain bullets at 2,450 fps. Oddly, neither the .303 nor early .300 Savage loads featured the ballistically superior pointed bullets the 1899’s spool fed safely, but that weren’t tenable in tube-fed Winchesters and Marlins!

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The Model 1899 flat in my palm, pressed to the earth, was built in 1909. Bored for the .25-35, it wore a tang sight far from the blade near the end of the 26-inch barrel. Chin on dirt as the buck advanced, I thought not about the merits of a long sight radius. Could I find that blade, a fist above the earth, behind a thin screen of grass? Raising my head or rifle would send the animal off.

At 200 yards the animal would have dropped to a shot from any scoped bolt rifle. I’d set my limit at half that distance. Slowly the buck closed. Finger taut on the trigger, I saw him pass at 100 steps. Don’t fire until he stops. I’d abandoned hope when he reversed course and paused, staring my way. The snap of the .25 sounded rimfire-thin. The buck dashed off, 20 yards, 40. He faltered; then he was down.

This South Dakota buck fell to offhand shots at 80 yards, from Wayne’s 1899 Savage in 25-35.

In 1930 the exposed-hammer, lever-action deer rifle faced a new challenge, as 24-year-old Texan Bill Weaver introduced his 330 rifle-scope. The ¾-inch steel tube perched in a “grasshopper” mount that resembled great wire clip. Scope and mount sold for $19. A heavy post reticle and dim image limited the effective reach of this 3x optic. But bullets were still shaped like bedrolls, and “fast” was still 2,000 fps.

By 1949 bolt-action rifles like Winchester’s Model 70 and the Remington 721/722 were drilled for scope mounts. So too the 99 Savage – also the 336 Marlin, which supplanted the Model 36 that year. Leupold had announced its first scope, the Plainsman, in ‘47, as Weaver introduced its K-series. Lyman’s Alaskan was by then nearly a decade in service. But despite in-roads from bolt rifles and cartridges that tapped the reach of optical sights, lever-actions still sold well. In 1953 Marlin added the .35 Remington to its 336 roster, and Winchester presented its two-millionth Model 94 to President Dwight Eisenhower!

In October of that year Ed Stockwell hiked into Arizona’s rugged Santa Rita Mountains. He and his partner split at the foot of a ridge, Ed taking the high route. Scrambling up into the rocks, he flushed two Coues bucks. They topped the ridge instantly and were gone. Ed dashed ahead, but despaired of a shot. The deer had vanished. Turning to descend, he glimpsed movement behind an oak. The biggest buck emerged 60 yards away. Ed fired quickly, killing the deer with his iron-sighted Savage 99. The antlers, he now saw, were huge! Later, they scored over 144 – so many inches the Boone & Crockett Club took pains to ensure this was indeed a Coues buck. It remains a world’s record.

When I started hunting deer, about a decade later, a new Winchester 94 cost $89.50. Marlin and Savage lever rifles shared that price stratosphere. So I found a Short Magazine Lee Enfield whose battle scars got me into the woods for $30. Williams iron sights, and a walnut blank from Herters, added another $22 over the next winter. Michigan’s $5 deer licenses became a bigger burden, however, when after three seasons I’d killed nothing. Then, one magical day, a pair of whitetails rocketed through a stand of poplars 90 yards off. I fired at the first, swinging as if at a grouse. To my astonishment, it somersaulted, dead.

Wayne used a Marlin 336 in .30-30 to kill this fine bull at 55 yards in the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

Bolt rifles have since pulled me too often from lever-actions, but I hunt more now with classic deer guns. And not just for deer. Savage 1899s in .25-35 and .303 took my last two pronghorns. A Model 99 in .300 got another, a 99A in .250 /3000 another still. My Marlin 1895 and a Browning/Winchester 71 in .308 Marlin Express and .348 Improved accounted for two more. All with iron sights, of course. I’ve taken a couple of elk with a scoped Marlin 336, a .30-30 that also collected a mule deer and a pronghorn. A heavy Alaskan black bear led me on a sneak through dense coastal cover until the wind shifted. The animal stiffened. I found a shot alley and fired that .30-30 from 80 yards. Heart-shot, the bear dashed into the forest, where I found it dying as light faded.

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Deer rifles have gained horsepower. Winchester developed the .348 in 1935 for the elegant Model 71, a follow-up to the 1886. Rifle and cartridge expired in 1957. Eight years later Marlin announced a 336 in .444 Marlin, developed by Thomas Robinson and Arthur Burns from the .30-06 hull. Its 240-grain and subsequent 265-grain bullets carried 1 ½ tons of energy out the muzzle. The spate of modern lever rifles in .45-70 aren’t limited to black-powder pressures; the old military load of a 405-grain bullet at 1,300 fps has been trumped by ammunition driving 325-grain bullets 2,000 fps. The .308 and .338 Marlin Express from Hornady’s shop deliver .308- and .30-06-class moxy from Marlin’s new Model 1895.

Winchester added muscle with a scope-friendly Angle Eject version of the 94, in .307 and (here) .356.

Winchester added muscle to its Model 94 with the .375 Winchester in a beefed-up 94 Big Bore in 1978. It hurled a 200-grain bullet at 2,200 fps, a 250 at 1,900. The .307 and .356 Winchester, introduced five years later, came as close to duplicating the .308 and .358 rounds as was possible in the rear-locking action. From 20-inch carbines, the .307’s 180-grain bullet clocks 2,360 fps, the .356’s 250-grain 2,050. Compared to such performance, early deer loads were anemic: 117-grain bullets from the .25-36 Marlin clocked 1,850 fps, 165s from the .32-40 just 1,450, 255s from the .38-55 only 1,300. The .30-30 first sent 160-grain softpoints at 1,960 fps.

The intimacy of shooting fast and close appeals to me. One of my best blacktail bucks dropped to a borrowed Winchester 94 I cycled lickety-split as the buck sprinted through cut-over 20 steps away and vanished in thick willows. Three of my four shots struck, the last shredding vitals. The deer expired. Not long after that blacktail episode I carried a Savage 99 into second-growth conifers. A whitetail sped away, but slowed as he winked out between boles. Suspecting other deer, I circled crosswind. A handful of deer sifted through the trees, foraging. I pegged the sight to an opening. The buck appeared, sunfished at the shot and jetted away. I found no blood, but a pea-size bit of pink tissue caught my eye. The deer had died in mid-stride after making a hard turn, a common last act of fatally hit game.

Last fall I borrowed again the 1899 Savage that had taken the Wyoming pronghorn to still-hunt a Dakota bottom thick with oaks on the hem of a treed swamp. Mid-morning, I spied a whitetail crossing a hillock in tall weeds. It was headed to the swamp. An opening showed tall antlers. As the buck moved behind a hummock, I hunched low and scooted forward. We came clear of weed cover at the same time. Bead on rib, I fired offhand and ran the lever as the deer raced for the timber. The hit had been solid, the bullet angling forward from mid-rib. But clearly the 110-grain .25-35 bullet had not exited. Tiny blood-stains, sparingly leaked to only one side of the track, led me to into the swamp, where I was sure to lose the trail. Then, there! Offhand, I slipped a bullet through the slot to the white tail-fringe. Another hit. But I fired again. And again.

Crossing water to reach the deer, I found it dead, a fine buck taken the old-fashioned way. A deer rifle is not just hardware. It has a pulse. And, sometimes, magic.

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SWIFT, WITH AMMUNITION

24HOURCAMPFIRE — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 03:25:40 +0000

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SWIFT, WITH AMMUNITION

by Wayne van Zwoll

When, 30 years ago, a small Kansas shop came up with a new bullet, no one could have predicted this!

Swift lists several lines of loaded ammo – some, like the .375 H&H, with both A-Frames and solids.

IN 1876 General George A. Custer met his end on bluffs above the Little Bighorn. It was also the model year for Winchester’s first large-frame lever-action rifle. In 1876 Nikolaus Otto developed a four-stroke internal-combustion engine that ran at 180 rotations per minute.

Much has changed in soldiering and rifles since then. Engines too; 35 years ago Honda’s NR500 motorcycle engine was reaching peak “service” horsepower at 19,000 rpms!

Progress in bullets has been less dramatic. Their shape is much the same as when cartridge rifles supplanted muzzle-loaders. Most bullets are still fashioned primarily of lead. But smokeless powder and modern steels have prompted changes. In part to keep bullets from melting as they brook breech pressures over 60,000 psi and launch speeds topping Mach 3, lead cores now get a dash of antimony (commonly 3 percent) and wear jackets of gilding metal (commonly 95 percent copper, 5 percent zinc). To better battle wind and gravity at distance, bullets have become sleeker. Myriad designs and devices have appeared to help hunting bullets carve lethal wound cavities in big game.

In another life, I edited Kansas Wildlife Magazine for the Kansas Fish and Game Commission. While most state wildlife agencies are headquartered in the capitol (Olympia, in my current home state of Washington) or in a major city (Portland, for Oregon’s DF&W), Kansas at that time staffed and ran its wildlife programs from Pratt, a rural town west of center in the state, comfortably distant from Topeka. The reason: Early on, a fish hatchery had sprung up near Pratt. During the agency’s formative years, that site had become by default its main camp. We who’d inherited that office counted ourselves blessed by the location. No one wanted to move east – not even those of us too busy to indulge in the excellent west-side hunting and fishing.

Wayne used a Scirocco (.30-06) to take this old, heavy Kansas deer. It dropped and died immediately.

In those days I free-lanced a bit for Rifle magazine. Ever poking around for stories to tell, I came across mention of a small bullet shop in Quinter, a few miles west of Pratt. One weekend I drove there to meet Lee Reed, a young man who’d started the enterprise. It was still new. Quinter wasn’t, but I surmised it hadn’t grown a great deal over the past few decades. Little of it protruded beyond the shadow cast by the central grain elevator. So despite lack of signage, Swift Bullets was easy to find.

In 1982, in the middle of the Big Empty, Lee decided he could make a better big game bullet. He started his company in a dimly lit building little more spacious than a rabbit warren. Crude benches held the tooling: C&H dies in loading presses. Corbin hardware helped him form cores, which he jacketed with .22 rimfire cases. Two years later he was ready to announce a new bullet, one based on two fine hunting designs dating to the 1940s. The German H-Mantle featured a lead core divided by a mid-section dam of jacket material. John Nosler’s similar Partition arrived in 1947 after standard softpoints failed to upend a moose he pummeled repeatedly with his .300 H&H. John’s handmade bullets were a hit with his pals, and soon he “went commercial,” eventually replacing his screw machines with more modern tooling.

Lee Reed figured the Partition, as good as it was, could be improved. In his primitive facility he succeeded in bonding the front part of the core, to reduce fragmenting. His A-Frame retained much more of its nose in penetration tests. The captive heel core didn’t need bonding, saving cost. Reed bought an ad in Shotgun News to announce the A-Frame. When I spotted him in Quinter, he was toting a plastic bucket half full of those bullets across a gravel drive. “It’s our conveyor belt,” he grinned.

Unpretentious and soft-spoken, Lee showed me around Swift Bullets. “It’s not fancy, but we have a wonderful staff. They’re salt-of-the-earth people, mostly from local farms. They know how to work, and they have a natural mechanical bent. We have to solve production problems ourselves, because there’s no one else to call.”

At that time, Lee had just returned from a cross-country trip. “I’d talked with Remington on the phone, told them they needed a bullet for really tough game, a bullet to complement the Core-Lokt. That has been around since 1937. It’s a good bullet. But hunters these days are willing to spend more to get more. They study bullets, dig them from game, weigh them. Magnum cartridges shred bullets when they hit big animals up close. Hunters …. well, I had to show Remington what I had. So I loaded my pickup with pails of A-Frame bullets and drove east.”

Not long thereafter, Remington started loading them.

A decade later Pepsi executive Bill Hober invested in Swift Bullets. The additional capital, with Hober’s marketing expertise, promised a brighter future for the company. But that change would sideline Lee Reed.

The new management promoted the A-Frame to handloaders and to ammunition manufacturers. Eventually Swift bullets would sell in 24 countries. Sako, in Finland, and Norma, in Sweden, would load them in finished cartridges. Meanwhile, Hober, his son Tony and the Swift crew went to work on a new design. The Swift Scirocco bullet appeared in 1999. A bonded lead-core bullet with no mid-section dam, it has a sleeker profile than the A-Frame, and a pointed black polymer tip. “It’s designed to drive deep in big game, like the A-Frame,” Bill told me. “But its higher ballistic coefficient means flatter flight, higher retained energy at distance.”

My first experience with the Scirocco came in Alaska, where foul weather delayed the bush plane scheduled to retrieve us from a remote caribou camp. Daily, rain pummeled our tents. We’d run short of food, scrounging blueberries from the tundra and rationing our pancake mix.

The grizzly bear that appeared on a hill early one morning was a welcome diversion to the fellow who had a tag for same. Three of us set off on a long sneak. Half an hour later, the hunter loosed a bullet from his new .300 Remington Ultra Mag. From 80 yards it struck a bit off the mark, upsetting the bear, which spun about with a roar, then hurled itself toward thick cover. Two rifles bellowed, and the grizzly somersaulted. Both bullets were Sciroccos. As we were quite hungry, I volunteered to filet the bruin’s backstraps. “It’s been scavenging caribou,” protested my pal. But the steaks came off anyway. I floured them, peppered them, then seared them in a hot skillet. Verily, I’ve never eaten better bear, or game meat more closely approaching that of elk and bighorn. It was tender, juicy and mild-flavored. Everyone must have shared my enthusiasm. All plates emptied fast. No steaks got cold.

The Scirocco appeared in 1999. Swift loads ammo with the flat-flying Scirocco II, from .223 to .338.

Later that week I tested the Scirocco’s penetration and integrity by firing my .30 magnum into successively thicker trees (live, wet spruces). The bullets bored easily through 4-inch, 6-inch, even 8-inch boles, blasting big holes on exit. Paths appeared straight, expansion uniform.

Some seasons on, I hunted deer with the Scirocco. A quartering buck took my .30-06 bullet in the forward ribs. It broke the off shoulder. The animal fell immediately and was quickly dead.

The A-Frame ranks among my favorites bullets for heavy game. It has behaved for me much like the Trophy Bonded design Federal bought from Jack Carter. I get double-diameter mushrooms that weigh very little less than they did in the cartridge. Expansion typically stops mid-shank. How much an intact heel contributes to straight-line penetration, I can’t say; but in my experience bullets that retain a “rudder” are less apt to wander than those that quickly “pancake” or “ball up.” A dam or thick heel jacket or solid heel will typically arrest or retard upset, which affects finished diameter and, like high sectional density at the start, enhances penetration. A-Frame mushrooms look like a mushrooms, and plow broad channels.

In Wyoming hills one October morning, still-hunting down a timbered ridge, I spied a splash of dun in the dark-green conifers. I crept closer, rifle ready. An elk’s shoulder winked in an opening. I sent a 150-grain Swift A-Frame from the .270 Howell. Elk thundered off in two directions. Following the hoof-gashes of the main group, I found no blood. Odd. I bird-dogged the others. Nada. Back where the target animal had stood, I glanced down the steep slope – and spied the elk. The A-Frame had minced its lungs. It had made but a single leap before tumbling down the hill, dead. Skinning, I found the bullet perfectly mushroomed under the off-side hide. Later it would scale 92 percent of starting weight.

Wayne killed this B.C. moose with a Swift 250-grain A-Frame in a Norma-loaded 9.3×62 cartridge.

In the crowded field of big game bullets these days, I can’t think of a better choice for elk than the Swift A-Frame. A 250-grain .266 bullet also served me, in a CZ 9.3×62, for moose and mountain goat. The moose fell to one shot at 40 yards. The obstinate billy absorbed two as he quartered off at 240.

Bill Hober and his company haven’t paused in their mission to grow Swift. There’s a Scirocco II now, which Bill claims opens at terminal speeds as low as 1,440 fps. “It still holds up to the tremendous stresses imposed on bullets by high-speed hits on thick bones and muscle.”

Both Scirocco and A-Frame lines boast more offerings, and they’ve been joined by a solid bullet for heavy African game. The Break-Away Solid comes in weights and diameters for the most popular of big-bores, from the 9.3×62 to the .500 Jeffery and .505 Gibbs. It’s a lead-core bullet with a thick jacket of proprietary metal. A short driving band and “rebated” ogive distinguish it – as does the polymer nose that improves feeding but breaks off on impact. The almost-squared-off nose underneath helps keep the bullet on a straight course during penetration.

Break-Away Solids, from 286 grains (.266) to 570 (.510) are designed for Africa’s toughest game.

Swift has added hollow-nose A-Frame revolver bullets to its catalog. “They’re designed to open at speeds down to 950 fps,” says Bill Hober, “but stay together at impact three times that violent. Average terminal diameter is 1.65 times the original, with 97 percent weight retention.” Two revolver bullets on the Swift list are also sold with sabots, for muzzle-loading rifles. “The .429 A-Frame for .44 Magnums serves 50-caliber black powder rifles; .452s for the .45 Colt and .454 Casull work in .54 muzzle-loaders.”

Scirocco II bullets, from 62-grain .224s to 210-grain .338s, come in 100-count boxes. A-Frames, from 100-grain .257s to 570-grain .510s, come 50 to a box. Neither is cheap; the A-Frame makes you dig a bit deeper. For example, a box of 150-grain 7mm Sciroccos lists for $63. A box of 140- or 160-grain A-Frames (half as many bullets) costs $57.75. Break-Away Solids are more expensive still, a box of 50 300-grain .375s setting you back $120.50.

Chafing at ammo prices? Ask these wranglers if they’d bet a back-country elk hunt on cheap loads!

Given Bill’s ambitions for Swift, I wasn’t surprised when, not long ago, I found just outside the shadow of Quinter’s grain elevator, a sparkling new bullet-making facility. In space, sophistication and, well, eye appeal, it had nothing in common with the original Swift digs – which had, in fairness, grown to accommodate the expanding product lines and climbing sales volumes. “We’re not stopping with bullets,” Hober confided during that preview. “We’re well on the way to making ammunition.”

This year you can buy Swift-manufactured ammunition in a half-dozen designated series. Some offerings on the lists have yet to come off the line at this writing, but the most common chamberings are at market. The series: Scirocco II, A-Frame, Lever-Action, A-Frame Heavy Rifle, Break-Away Solid and Heavy Revolver. You’ll find cartridge cases nickel-plated for Heavy Rifle/Dangerous Game (A-Frame and Break-Away Solid) and Heavy Revolver loads. Here’s the whole caboodle a glance, cartridges then bullet weights in grains:

Scirocco II

.223 – 75

.243 – 90

.270 – 130

7mm Rem. Mag. – 150

.308 – 150

.30-06 – 180

.300 Win. Mag. – 180

.300 Wby. Mag. – 180

.300 RUM – 180

.338 Win. Mag. – 210

.338 Lapua – 210

A-Frame

.270 – 150

7mm Rem. Mag. – 160

.308 – 165

.30-06 – 180

.300 Win. Mag. – 180

.300 Wby. Mag. – 180

.300 RUM – 200

.338 Win. Mag. – 250

.338 Lapua – 250

Lever-Action (A-Frame, engineered to expand and penetrate at impact velocities 1,200 to 2,700 fps)

.45-70 – 350 A-Frame

A-Frame, Heavy Rifle/Dangerous Game

9.3×62 – 286

.375 H&H – 300

.375 Ruger – 300

.416 Rem. Mag. – 400

.416 Rigby – 400

.404 Jeffery – 400

.458 Win. Mag. – 500

.458 Lott – 500

.470 NE – 500

.505 Gibbs – 570

.500 Jeffery – 570

.500 NE – 570

Break-Away Solid, Heavy Rifle/Dangerous Game

9.3×62 – 286

.375 H&H – 300

.375 Ruger – 300

.416 Rem. Mag. – 400

.416 Rigby – 400

.404 Jeffery – 400

.458 Win. Mag. – 500

.458 Lott – 500

.470 NE – 500

.505 Gibbs – 570

.500 Jeffery – 570

.500 NE – 570

A-Frame, Heavy Revolver (hollow-point A-Frames, designed to expand and penetrate from 950 fps)

.357 Mag. – 180

.41 Mag. – 210

.44 Mag. – 300

.45 Colt – 265

.454 Casull – 300

.460 S&W – 300

.500 S&W – 325

Ammunition comes in 20-round boxes (except .357 revolver loads, 25 to a box). Retail prices for the new Swift ammo are predictably high. For example:

.243 Scirocco – $45.50

.300 Win. Mag. Scirocco – $59.25

.300 Win. Mag. A-Frame – $64.75

.375 H&H Mag. A-Frame – $84.50

.44 Mag. A-Frame – $48.25

On the other hand, whether you pay $1 for a cartridge, or $4 – even if you fire a box of them from hunting positions after zeroing – you won’t notice the ding in your bank account. And ammunition is one of the smallest investments you’ll make in any hunt. A Montana NR deer/elk license now costs $1,000, a basic Ram 4×4 crew-cab half-ton about $35,000. You’ll spend more to fill its tank with $3 gasoline than you’ll pay for a box of Swift cartridges for your 7mm or .300 Magnum. Then there’s camp gear, food, the packer’s fee to haul your elk or moose out of the woods. Any guided hunt bumps total cost like an NFL kicker boots a football.

My wife, Alice, tells me nickels come out of my pocket just a little thinner than most. She’s right. But do I hunt with sub-standard loads to save a few pennies? Not yet.

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FACTORY RIFLE AMMO

24HOURCAMPFIRE — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 00:33:08 +0000

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FACTORY RIFLE AMMO

by John Barsness

Even for experienced handloaders, considerable improvements in factory ammunition in recent years is a boon.

DURING A RECENT conversation about a hunt, somebody asked what handload was used. When I told him it was a factory load, he frowned and said, “Why would you ever hunt with anything but handloads?”

Why indeed? Isn’t one of the major points of being a rifle loony using handloads carefully worked up over several hours at the bench and range for your specific rifle? Plus, all rifle loonies know factory ammo is inferior to handloads.

Actually a lot of the time it’s not, for several reasons, but when I started handloading back in the Cenozoic Era (the 1960’s) most handloaders firmly believed our ammo was superior to factory stuff. We could work up loads specifically for our rifles, resulting in finer accuracy and more velocity, and use superior custom bullets.

This was probably true for the factory ammo of the period. Only Weatherby loaded anything except a basic cup-and-core bullet in their ammunition, offering Nosler Partitions in some loads. The bullets and ammo loaded by other companies were often not very precisely dimensioned, because the factories didn’t have to make great ammo: Relatively few hunters handloaded, so factory ammo was their only choice.

However, even many of our handloads weren’t all that great back then. I read a lot of books and magazine articles, and can’t remember reading anything concerning how bullet alignment in the case affected accuracy, or how playing with seating depth might tighten groups. Instead you were supposed to try different bullets to see which one your rifle “liked” (which might have been due to how well your seating die’s stem matched that particular bullet, resulting in straighter rounds, as I discovered a couple decades later). In reality better accuracy was probably mostly due to using bullets that were better-balanced than most factory bullets, loaded in cases fired in our rifles’ chambers.

None of us had chronographs, so we had no idea whether our ammo was actually faster than factory stuff. One of my buddies bought a 7mm Remington Magnum, then the Hot In-Cartridge, because like a lot of hunters he was convinced it was vastly superior to old-fashioned rounds like the .270 Winchester and .30-06 Springfield. He handloaded 160-grain bullets with a powder charge his manual said would get 3000 fps, then killed a pile of deer, black bears and elk. He was convinced his Big Seven (as many Montanans called the round back then) was indeed super.

But when affordable chronographs appeared a decade or so later, he discovered his magic handload was actually getting around 2700 fps, about like a warmly loaded 7×57 Mauser. You might think he’d have noticed the trajectory wasn’t as flat as it should have been, but he lived in the steep, timbered mountains of western Montana, where shots over 250 yards are rare. (Or at least they were before long-range hunters started backing up their pickups to extend ranges). Instead, his Big Seven killed well because he shot it well, something many owners of 7×57’s and its modern equivalent, the 7mm-08, have been doing for over a century.

I had a similar experience with my first chronograph, purchased in 1979, and the first rifle I seriously handloaded for, a Remington 700 .243 Winchester. According to the Speer manual, my handload with the 105 Hot-Cor would get very close to 3000 fps, but instead the velocity turned out to be a little under 2800. The load had killed a bunch of animals neatly, but the chronograph ruined it. I switched to a 100-grain bullet and leaned on the powder charge, because I had to get 3000. It worked too, but no better than the “slow” 105-grain load.

Since those days factory ammunition has improved considerably, partly because so many hunters handload and own chronographs. This competition forced factories to start loading better bullets, both in construction and accuracy. Velocity is still sometimes a little lower than specifications in our rifles, for a couple of reasons. First, many factory rifles have larger bores and chambers than test barrels, and second, even SAAMI velocity specifications are allowed to vary plus or minus 90 fps. However, as my .243 and my friend’s Big Seven demonstrated, so what?

For several reasons I kill quite a few big game animals with factory ammunition, though exactly how many varies from year to year. The most important reason is I’m a professional gun and hunting writer, so should know how factory ammo works, and because of my job get invited on some hunts where shooting factory ammo is part of the deal. But I also use factory ammo for some of my own hunting.

Out of curiosity I looked over my hunting notes for the past decade to see how many animals were taken with factory ammo. During that period I took fewer animals than in the previous decade, because of a conscious decision to spend more time hunting with family and friends, but still killed 97 big game animals. (It probably would have been over 100, but one fall’s hunting was mostly wiped out by my Labrador dislocating my knee while upland hunting in September, resulting in only one big game animal taken that year.)

Of the 97 animals, 38 were taken with factory ammo and 59 with handloads, though four of the handloads were loaded by other people for the borrowed rifles I used on two hunts, so only 55 of my own handloads were used, slightly more than half the total. The factory ammo ranged from the .243 Winchester to the .338 Winchester Magnum, and no problems were encountered with any of it, whether in accuracy or bullet performance, despite some of the bullets being “cup-and-cores.”

I also handloaded for some of the same rifles, before or after the hunts, and had a hard time beating the accuracy of some factory ammo. One memorable example was the Federal Premium .308 Winchesters loaded with 150-grain Ballistic Tips used in a Sako rifle on an “industry” pronghorn and mule deer hunt in Wyoming. Three-shot groups averaged ½’ to ¾” at 100 yards, and I took the mule deer buck at almost 450 yards. The pronghorn was only 250 yards away but facing me directly, and the bullet landed at the “dimple” at the base of the throat. (It also exited the buck’s right ham.)

In several other rifles carious factory loads shot into an inch or less, and along with the hunting I shot a pile of factory ammo at targets out to 1000 yards, and various varmints out to 800. There were no fail-to-fires, and accuracy was always up to the task. Some of the rifles were customs or limited production rifles, but most were factory.

In fact, I’ve talked to several handloaders during this past decade who couldn’t match some factory-ammo accuracy with their handloads. Without exception, they were still trying to work up loads the old-fashioned way, by trying different bullets to see what their rifle liked, and weren’t checking bullet run-out. This can be a big factor, because a lot of factory ammo is very concentric.

The reason is simple: Factory brass isn’t run through a typical expander-ball sizing die, which often pulls the neck out of alignment with the case body. Instead, factory cases are formed by running them into a forming die without an expander ball, so the necks of new factory cases are normally very straight. (The exception occurs when factory forming dies wear enough to produce crooked cases, but they’re normally replaced often enough to prevent this.)

The mouths of new cases can be dinged slightly, but the overall neck is still straight. Yet some handloaders still full-length size every new case they buy, usually in a typical loading die with an expander ball—which means a lot of their new brass ends up less straight than when it left the factory. If the mouths of new cases need cleaning up, I run them over an expander ball, usually with the decapping stem loosened to allow the ball to center itself in the neck, but there’s no reason to size the rest of the case.

These very straight cases are what factories use to load factory ammo, so bullets in factory ammo are often seated straighter than in typical handloads. As an example, I recently bought 100 rounds of Hornady American Whitetail factory 7mm-08 ammunition, loaded with the 139-grain Interlock Spire Point. The reason for the purchase will be explained a little further on, but one of the first things I did was test a box for bullet run-out.

Eighteen of the rounds had run-out of .003” or less, and the other two measured .004” and .005”. That’s the level I try for when handloading most big game ammo, because in most big game rifles (especially factory rifles) .005” of bullet run-out provides all the accuracy possible.

Now, in some (not all) custom big game rifles, straighter bullet alignment can make a difference. I once owned a custom 7×57 that shot extremely well, and once took it on an industry hunt where factory ammo had to be used. I sorted through three boxes of ammo with the Casemaster, dividing the rounds into a straightest box (no more than .003” runout), a crooked box (more than .005” runout), and an in-between box (.004-.005”). The straightest box shot groups averaging ½” to ¾” at 100 yards, the in-between box about an inch, and the crooked box around and inch and a half.

The only real difficulty I’ve occasionally run into with factory ammo in quite a while is occasional erratic performance in cold weather. I test ammo that might be used in real cold in real cold, at least down around zero Fahrenheit, and not just by putting the ammo in a chest freezer overnight, but by shooting it in cold weather, with my rifle also cold, just like it would be shot in the field. Some factory ammo loses considerable velocity and changes point of impact noticeably at 100 yards in real cold, and some even hangfires.

However, so do some handloads, the reason I also check them in real cold if they might be used in sub-zero temperatures. But for most of the big game hunting most of us do, in temperatures from maybe 20 degrees to 90, factory ammo works fine, especially if we don’t shoot at big game beyond 500 yards.

But isn’t factory ammo far more expensive than handloads? Not always. The reason I bought the 100 rounds of Hornady 7mm-08’s was a rebarreled tang-safety Ruger 77 purchased off the Campfire Classifieds. I hadn’t owned a 7mm-08 in a while, so there wasn’t any brass in my stash. Sure, 7-08’s are easily formed by necking-down .308’s, but I wanted properly headstamped brass, partly because I have three .308’s.

I looked in local stores on the off-chance somebody had overlooked a bag of 7-08 cases, but no such luck. An Internet search turned up four brands in stock, but prices were pretty high. All but Prvi Partizan were around $100 per 100 cases, and with shipping even the Prvi would cost about $65.

However, during the search I came across the Hornady ammo, and including shipping the price was $22 a box. After subtracting the cost of primers, powder and bullets, the cases ended up costing about the same as the new Prvi brass. Plus, I’d gotten excellent accuracy out of American Whitetail ammo in several cartridges already, and the 139 Hornady Interlock was the bullet I’d planned on loading anyway, since it’s killed a bunch of game from pronghorn to caribou for me over the years. In the Ruger the ammo shot around an inch at a muzzle velocity just under 2800 fps, which considering the 22” barrel was right at the listed factory velocity of 2820 fps. After the 100 rounds gets shot up I’ll have 100 factory cases, fire-formed in my rifle’s chamber.

So yes, I shoot a lot of factory ammo, for a bunch of reasons—but mainly because it works!

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